Transfering Data

What would be the best way to transfer a string of data I collect from sensors on the serial port to a server?
I’ve tried the URL append technique, similar to a HTML POST, but my site is on a shared server and I can’t use that IP address.
Which is odd - I can FTP a file to it. However, I don’t want to transfer a file. I just want to send a string a characters. Sounds like it should be easy. But!
Ideas welcome - there must be bundles of folks collecting data from instruments and sending it up to a server.: