dem22

I forgot to mention that my host people offered to reset ownership/permissions in public_html directory but advised that I will have to restore/resolve any issues after this.

Do you know if such an action will break the websites or is it safe?

There must be around 20 wordpress websites and 4-5 html sites.

Thank you once more!

Hi Mia,

Thank you for your response.

Is it possible that wordfence or the firewall being enabled after learning mode completed had caused ownership and file permissions issue on the wordpress installation? The reason I ask you this is that I have around 20 wordpress sites on the server (shared instance). Suddenly all but 3 are exhibiting the same issue, asking for FTP credentials to connect due to ownership. I have not seen this before in my 20 years of using wordpress and hosting sites. There’s always a first!

File permissions seem to be ok but ownership isn’t!

I tried everything the last 3-4 days trying days and nights to sort this out as it is affecting my clients’s websites. Anyway, my server support reassured me that permission and ownership is intact as it has always been (apparently username:username where username is my username as the only user on the server and cPanel). I mentioned to them that maybe www-data should be in the group but they said that nothing has changed.

These are not new websites. Some go back as old as 15 years. Suddenly all but 3 exhibiting this. This is driving me crazy! Is it possible wordfence is causing this?

Shall I deactivate delete the plugin? Shall I remove entries related to wordfence, waf in .htaccess, php.ini, user.ini etc?

Any help with this would be highly appreciated as I’m at a loss here and exhausted physically spending endless hours without a fix.

Thank you!