Webserver is “empty” when SFTP-ed into but website is still there?

Question

I’ve been put in charge of maintaining a website. When I took over it I was given SFTP credentials and accessed and edited the files through Dreamweaver.

I’ve subsequently changed Dreamweaver accounts because the trial ran out and now have a proper version. However when I SFTP into it now the server just has an empty root directory.

I checked this by using the SFTP command in terminal and it’s showing the exact same result (empty root folder).

tazer@HMSLinux ~ $ sftp [e-mail]
[e-mail]'s password:
Connected to www.lceresearch.unsw.edu.au.
sftp> pwd
Remote working directory: /
sftp> ls
sftp> cd ..
sftp> pwd
Remote working directory: /
sftp> ls
sftp>

What’s gone wrong?! The website is still there on the Internet, I used a WGET script to crawl through it and download everything. So why is nothing showing up when I use SFTP?

EDIT: With respect to what OS the server is running:

$ curl -I www.lceresearch.unsw.edu.au
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 24104
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 01:15:01 GMT
ETag: "1e00bc-5e28-519dc423d9134"
Last-Modified: Thu, 02 Jul 2015 03:44:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.31 (Amazon)
Connection: keep-alive

Answer 1

Unclear by what you mean by this:

…has an empty root directory.

What exactly are you referring to as the “root” directory? Do you mean you logged in via SFTP and saw nothing? Or are you trying to maneuver to a directory you know has content named /root or something else?

I’ve subsequently changed Dreamweaver accounts because the trial ran out and now have a proper version. However when I SFTP into it now the server just has an empty root directory.

Seems like the issue is you have the correct SFTP credentials, but the old setup might just have a default path set you never noticed.

And while it’s not clear to me what OS or system you are SFTP’ing into, in general Linux systems have web files stored in the /var/www path on the system. So once you login to the system, attempt to maneuver to /var/www or if you have the option to set a default path when logging in, set that to /var/www. Doing a simple check with curl -I (to return server headers) shows it’s running Apache/2.2.31 which is a web server used mainly on Linux/Unix setups so it would be safe to say you are using Linux.

In some cases you might have a per-user directory setup that is something like this: /home/[username]/public_html/ where [username] equates to the username you have as your SFTP login. But that’s really not as commonly used nowadays.