CHMOD permissions and upgrading – having a nightmare

Howdy,

Hope you can help me.

I run a plethora of WordPress sites on my shared hosting I have and have no problems with plugin installation or upgrades. It’s a beautiful smooth process.

However, in my 9 to 5 they run their own dedicated server and I’ve been brought in to WordPressify lots of sites.

I’m having a lot of permission issues. I can’t do much with the wp-content folder without setting 777 on everything. Upgrading of WordPress to a new version automatically always fails. Plugins tentatively upgrade automatically when they want to.

I’m just confused as to the difference between my shared hosting and the dedicated server my work has. I don’t have to play with any file permissions at all on my own hosting, yet it’s 777 at work. And this is bad, right?

The main thing I’m bothered about is the upgrade process as it creates more work and more downtime by doing it manually.

Does anyone have a clue as to what might be different? What can I change to fix this? Is there a magic setting in PHP.ini I could change to fix this? Maybe “Make my life hell = 0;” instead of being set to 1?

Would love some help from you beautifully brainy people.

Thanks in advance,

Greg