There are many ways to do it.
1) you can do it directly by acting on your program. For instance, with ProFTPd, insert this line
TransferRate RETR,STOR,APPE,STOU 1000
in the file /etc/proftpd.conf. This will limit bandwidth to 1000 kB/s. The same thing cannot be done with ssh though, which has always been meant for interactive sessions, not background downloads.
2) You can use tc (=Traffic Control, appropriately). I have little experience with it, I can just point you to this fine Introduction to the topic. I find this solution too ad hoc for my tastes, and too difficult to port, but of course you may differ, so do take a look at it.
3) You can use QoS (=Quality of Service) in your router. You will have to find a voice QoS in your GUI, and see the specifics. It will allow you to set limits depending on MAC address or application (you can define a new application as you wish, if the one you want to throttle is not already in the list), but not the two simultaneously. This means that if you throttle ftp this way, it will be throttled for all pcs on your LAN. If you want to evade this constrain, you will have to set up a VLAN or a DMZ (which might be a good idea anyway, security-wise), in which you place only your server.
As ever, YMMV.
I wouldn't bother unless it's actually affecting something. I run a webserver at home, and the only time when my internet at home gets affected is when someone downloads a big file from my home server, which was almost never. – Lawrence – 2013-12-24T05:51:04.263
ill go ahead and try w/o throttling first then. Could you tell me how to set it up in case I decide to? – cbalos – 2013-12-24T06:54:05.157