Midnight Commander is great!
I use it for file management on my wife's iMac (I'm usually ssh'd in, while she uses the console). I also use it to keep her small business web site updated (it supports ftp, which is what my wife's web host uses).
Ouch!
By all means, please switch to a protocol of the 21th century!
Midnight commander supports secure protocols like SCP or SFTP as well.
Also, there's sshfs which allows you to handle the remote directory like a local one without any special features of mc (or KDE or Gnome). However, I don't know whether sshfs is available on the Mac.
Anyway, there's hardly any reason to use FTP, unless your hosting provider doesn't care a lot about security.