.htaccess not writable

Hey y’all,

I’ve just installed WP through cPanel onto my server. As standard, I always install W3 Total Cache as one of my first plugins but I’ve tried to on this occasion and as I’ve tried to activate it an error pops up saying

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

It tells me to:

Edit file /.htaccess and add the following rules above the WordPress directives:
# BEGIN W3TC Browser Cache
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</IfModule>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/x-component application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript text/x-js text/html text/richtext image/svg+xml text/plain text/xsd text/xsl text/xml image/x-icon application/json
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
# DEFLATE by extension
AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css htm html xml
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
# END W3TC Browser Cache

I did this, uploaded the .htaccess back onto my server through FTP and it looks as though nothing has happened.

What can I do?