Unlike FTP, SFTP (secure FTP) is encrypted to protect your data and passwords.
It uses similar technology to SSH relying on MD5 certificates which are generated when the first connection is made.
Some hosts will only allow the use of SSH / SFTP, which can be problematic if your HTML editor does not support this.
NVU is a good example of such an editor, only supporting FTP. Older versions of DreamWeaver (pre 2004) also share this problem.
The solution to this problem can be an FTP SFTP bridge, like Mind Term provided by Appleagate. mind Term is a Java based program, so you will need Java installed on your computer to run it.
You connect to your site via comman line console, once connected you can start the SFTP FTP bridge:
Once the bridge is started, Mind Term will listen on localhost (127.0.0.1) for FTP requests:
So, now you have Mind Term connected via SFTP to your server, but also listening on your local PC for FTP requests.
All that you need to do then is use localhost / 127.0.0.1 as the ‘remote server’ in your HTML editor.
Mind Term is free (for personal use) and can be downloaded here.