[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] htaccess not writable and cant create directories

Hi, my company are planning to move away from our old hosting provider and I’m currently evaluating a possible replacement, and I wanted to test load times so I installed W3 Total Cache to make it a fair test. On activation, I get:

FTP credentials don’t allow to write to file /.htaccess

and:

W3 Total Cache Error: Files and directories could not be automatically created to complete the installation.

I’ve tried chmodding the htaccess all the way to 777 and it still produces this error. If I modify the permalink structure WordPress itself is able to edit htaccess, but the plugin apparently cant. I’ve added the rules it suggests to the htaccess manually but the errors still display, and none of the minify settings seem to work.

I’m seeing this on two WordPress’s on seperate accounts of our reseller package – one is an actual company website I’ve been building, and the other was installed using the Softaculous installer the host provides and has no other plugins etc. Both are latest version.

The only oddity right now is that I’m accessing the sites using the server IP as we don’t want to move our domains until we’re satisfied, so the url is of the form http://000.000.000.000/~myaccount/. Depending how W3TC determines the path to the htaccess could it possibly be getting some info from the server which contains the actual domain?

Thanks for any ideas anyway 🙂
— w