Hi Phani,
FTPS and HTTPS both protocols are used for uploads and downloads, for text and for binary, both over TCP/IP. But there are a lot of differences in the details:
1) FTP has a notion of file format so it can transfer data as ASCII or binary (and more) where HTTP always sends things binary. FTP thus also allows text conversions when ASCII files are sent between systems of different sorts.
HTTP provides meta-data with files, Content-Type, which clients use but FTP has no such thing. The meta data can thus be used by clients to intrepret the contents accordingly.
2) Transfers with HTTP always also include a set of headers that send meta data. FTP does not send such headers. When sending small files, the headers can be a significant part of the amount of actual data tranfered. HTTP headers contain info about things such as last modified date, character encoding, server name and version and more.
3) One of the biggest hurdles about FTP in real life is its use of two connections. It uses a first primary connection to send control commands on, and when it sends or receives data, it opens a second TCP stream for that purpose.
4) FTP and HTTP have a different set of authentication methods documented. While both protocols offer basically plain-text user and password by default, there are several commonly used authentication methods for HTTP that isn't sending the password as plain text, but there aren't as many (non-kerberos) options available for FTP.
5) For HTTP communication, a client can maintain a single connection to a server and just keep using that for any amount of transfers. FTP must create a new one for each new data transfer.
6) HTTP provides a way for the client and server to negotiate and use (different) compression for the sent data. The gzip algorithm being the perhaps most compact one.
FTP offers an official "built-in" run length encoding that compresses the amount of data to send, but not by a great deal on ordinary binary data. It has also traditionally been done for FTP using various "hackish" approaches that were never in any FTP spec.
7) One of the biggest selling points for HTTP over FTP is its support for proxies, already built-in into the protocol from day 1. The support is so successful and well used that lots of other protocols can be sent over HTTP these days just for its ability to go through proxies.
FTP has always been used over proxies as well, but that was never standardized and was always done in lots of different ad-hoc approaches.
😎 For a single shot small file, you might get it faster with FTP (unless the server is at a long round-trip distance). When getting multiple files, HTTP should be the faster one.
Based on your client requirement you can go ahead with the suitable one considering the above points.
Regds,
Pinangshuk.
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