ProFTPD developed out of the desire to have a secure and configurable FTP server, and out of a real admiration for the Apache web server.


There are currently a very limited number of FTP servers running on Unix (or Unix-like) hosts. The most commonly used server is wu-ftpd. While wu-ftpd provides excellent performance and is generally a good product, it lacks numerous features found in newer Win32 FTP servers and has a poor security history.

Many people, including the developers who work on ProFTPD, have spent a great deal of time fixing bugs and hacking features into wu-ftpd. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that a complete redesign was necessary in order to implement the configurability and features desired.

ProFTPD is not a hack based on any other server, it's an independent source tree from the ground up. A number of well known and high traffic sites use ProFTPD.