550 Permission Denied - can't do anything
Posted: 2022-12-16 15:39
Hello everyone, I'm quite new to FTP and currently create a website for a client - unfortunately I only experience problems since installing WordPress via FTP and don't know what to do anymore. I'll try to explain all the errors that happened since the installation;
First I was confused because the remote server was completely empty, no public_html folder or anything (as I learned that WordPress will be installed in that folder) so I went on and just transferred the file on the empty server. I could log in to WordPress but when I wanted to install plugins, I got asked for FTP credentials. They got accepted, but then I couldn't upload anything. Turns out that according to Site health in WP backend, none of the folders are writable. So I researched and tried to change the file permissions to 755 etc, which first seemed to work.
Still, the error remained and nothing I could find online has helped to make the directories writable. Yesterday I decided to install WordPress again, thinking that I might have made a mistake. But when trying to delete the installation via FTP, I got the 550 permission denied error. Same thing for creating folders, changing permissions or deleting. I don't know what changed, now I seemed to have messed it up completely. The site is down as well, but the 4 main directories are still visible in FTP, as well as the data tables in phpmyadmin.
Can anyone please help me understand what goes wrong here, I really need to find a solution to get WordPress installed on that domain. The hosting owner doesn't want to give me the hosting log in to check for issues there, so I only have FTP and phpmyadmin to work with. Thank you for reading!
First I was confused because the remote server was completely empty, no public_html folder or anything (as I learned that WordPress will be installed in that folder) so I went on and just transferred the file on the empty server. I could log in to WordPress but when I wanted to install plugins, I got asked for FTP credentials. They got accepted, but then I couldn't upload anything. Turns out that according to Site health in WP backend, none of the folders are writable. So I researched and tried to change the file permissions to 755 etc, which first seemed to work.
Still, the error remained and nothing I could find online has helped to make the directories writable. Yesterday I decided to install WordPress again, thinking that I might have made a mistake. But when trying to delete the installation via FTP, I got the 550 permission denied error. Same thing for creating folders, changing permissions or deleting. I don't know what changed, now I seemed to have messed it up completely. The site is down as well, but the 4 main directories are still visible in FTP, as well as the data tables in phpmyadmin.
Can anyone please help me understand what goes wrong here, I really need to find a solution to get WordPress installed on that domain. The hosting owner doesn't want to give me the hosting log in to check for issues there, so I only have FTP and phpmyadmin to work with. Thank you for reading!