I have an account at a host where they use cpanel. Apparently, cpanel does not seem to work well with the suExec module. Hence any scripts installed end up creating files/directories with 550 permission - can't do anything with them if I want to openup and edit, move, delete etc., This happens despite the fact that the scripts are written to chmod the directories to 777, when they are created. They still set the permission to 550.

So, is this something do with the way their servers are setup or is this an issue with any server that is using cpanel?

thanks

If the files are owned by you (which they should be under an suEXEC system), you can just chmod them back to 700 or whatever you want them to be.

Thank you for your answer but tell me something that I don't know ;-) The reason I cannot chmod is because the permissons are 550 and I said cpanel does not seem to work well with suExec and hence it is not installed.