Sorry if this has been talked about before and please point me to those references. I am now running my own Ubuntu web server however I have been hitting problems with authorities and FTPing up files. Right now I have all of my web stuff under /var/www. But every time I do something there, I then have to do a chown www-data:www-data to make sure everything keeps working properly. In reality, I want to be able to FTP into my server upload what I want and just have it work without having to worry about authorities every time.
Should I have put everything under /home/user/public_html/mydomain1.com and home/user/public_html/mydomain2.com? What authorities should that then have? user:www-data? user:user?
Do I need to make any changes to the Apache config?
Update: How do I setup proFTP to make sure that I can access /var/www if that is the route I continue one?
Zoredache has answered this fairly well already. You should set the UMASK appropriately. His answer is here: What's the best way of handling permissions for Apache 2's user www-data in /var/www?