550 Permission Denied - can't do anything

[lunalanga]

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!

[botg]

If the FTP server and Webserver run under different user accounts, permissions will be all wonky. In this case the server administrator needs to log in using an SSH client and, probably as root, manually adjust the permissions and file ownership.

[lunalanga]

Hello, thank you so much for your response, that makes sense! Still, I'm not sure who owns the administrator server, is that the host provider that I have to ask to change the file permissions or is it the owner of the webhosting contract? Or can I do that myself somehow? Thank you for your help!

[boco]

Usually the hosting provider that runs the server, however, if you have a contract with a reseller or redistributor, you'll probably need to contact them first (so they can ask on your behalf).