ANSWER:

I posted this on the AWS Developers Forum:

I probably shouldn’t even be writing in here because I’m not a developer and 99% of what’s written in this forum is absolute Chinese to me, but I was tinkering with Filezilla tonight and FINALLY managed a connection – in Active mode, no less. I couldn’t find a single tutorial anywhere that was written in plain English and that had steps I could actually perform. They were always “Oh you just have to download FZebra and metabolize your SQL tables with

So by sheer dumb luck, here’s what I did:

Don’t ask me why, but I set the IP address [Edit>Settings>Active Mode>Use the following IP address:] to the private one from my AWS dashboard.
[Edit>Settings>Passive Mode] is set to “Fall back to active mode”.
Port 22 is set as inbound SSH port in my security groups….

I logged in using sftp://ec2-111-11-111-111.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ (no, not actually all 1′s) with username (in format: username, no @ or anything) and my password, and Port 22 selected.

I hope this helps some simpletons like me out there. Why couldn’t I find a simple answer when I needed one? Why isn’t there an FAQ for this or something? Normal people update websites too, ya know. Not everything has to be in uber-advanced programmer lingo.

Cheers

by Jeff from http://superuser.com/questions/415056