ok so I've got my site running well on a Linode 512 node running Maverick.

It's running Apache (Prefork MPM) and PHP5 as an apache mod.

My previous shared hosting environment ran WHM/Cpanel with the default suphp handler. As a result I never had to mess around with php file/folder permissions.

Running PHP as an apache mod makes things a little trickier. For the moment to allow for ease of plugin installs, wordpress updates etc. I changed the ownership of all files inside my public_html root to be owned by wwwdata. I found a few blog posts suggesting this.

This makes any permissions disappear but should I be worried about the security of this?

Is there a better solution than chown www-data?

I don't really want to go back suphp but still do want the flexibility of installing plugins, core wordpress updates etc. without having to toggle permissions before/after each such task.

Thanks,

Ed

One thing that I had

There are some tips here on permissions:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress