If I set FS Method to Direct Plugins fail to update

I am new to WP and my knowledge is just barebones, so please be kind.

Few months back, I installed WP on a pay per use hosting company – NearlyFreeSpeech dot net. I created a new DB and then installed WP. Things looked good so far. I was able to install a theme, install plugins etc. and build the site. Then I ran into a few plugins, which were causing the site to crash, when I would activate them. Error was pointing to me having to put in the FTP credentials each time I needed to update the plugins. So, I did some search and found that the error was coming from FS not having direct access to WP files. The solution I found was to add this code to my wp_condif file: define( ‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’ );

After this, the original error of website crashing when activating a few plugins was fixed. However, now I was running into a bigger issue – most if not all plugins were failing to update. Error was inconsistency with file permission and not being able to write all files. So, I have been reading how to fix WP file permission and found that I could do it from FTP/ SFTP tool and temporary change the file permission recursively to all files with 666 (not safe but okay to just try). I did this for wp_config and wp_includes dir. However, the issue persisted. So I disabled FS_Method = direct and updated my plugins, entering the ftp credentials into the prompt box manually. But now I am back to some of the plugins crashing the site.

If anyone knows what is going wrong and can guide me, I will appreciate it a lot. I did notice that my DB (maria DB) has a different user name than the FTP/SFTP credentials to the hosing server. So it could be that the WP files are owned by user x (ftp credentials) while the DB user is user Y, causing permission issues? I am not sure, as I am not an expert in this. Please help!!

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