I’m currently on a Media Temple DV 3.5 hosting server and I design and develop using wordpress a lot. WP seems to work great on shared servers as far as the auto upgrades, installing plugins and uploading media. However, WordPress installs on my server always required me to use an FTP program to temporarily change directory permissions to 777 in order to upgrade WP itself or plugins and I had various issues uploading media through the media manager. Even then, I still had to input the FTP password in the WordPress backend. This gets to be a pain if you’re actively using a WordPress as a Content Management System. Of course leaving directory permissions at 777 is not a valid option so I did a little digging and found that several other people had the same issue.

I had previously used suPHP to take care of this but there’s a much easier solution found on the MT forums… https://forums.mediatemple.net/viewtopic.php?id=4413 – This solution uses FastCGI+SuExec to allow php scripts to fix permissions issues on a media temple dv server. It’s fairly easy to accomplish and isn’t quite as messy as installing suPHP.