Wordpress installation guide

I followed this guide: https://www.linode.com/docs/websites/cm … -wordpress">https://www.linode.com/docs/websites/cms/how-to-install-and-configure-wordpress

All worked very well indeed until it came to updating my installation. I had a problem with the last part of step 2 in the section on configuring wordpress which states:

Next, give WordPress permission to add and edit files in the wp_content folder:

1 chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/public_html/wp-content

This works for updating and installing plugins but not for updating wordpress to the latest version. To get that to work, I changed the owner of public_html to www-data thus

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/public_html

I'm posting this in case anyone else hits the same issue or in case my solution is problematic from a security perspective.