webmechanic

Look in the root folder of your WordPress installation and see if there is already a file named .htaccess. If there is change the file permissions to 666 and reapply your permalink structure. It should work. Once it has worked change the file permissions back to something like 644.

You can change the file permissions easily in cPanel’s File Manager, simply select the file and click on the Change Permissions button. 666 is when the top two rows are all selected. 644 is when the top row and the first box of the second row are selected.

If there isn’t already a .htaccess file you could use FTP or the File Manager in cPanel if you are using that to upload an empty text file called htaccess to the root folder of your WordPress installation. Once you have uploaded it rename it to .htaccess, change the file permissions to 666 then apply the permalinks.

Don’t forget to change the file permissions back one the Permalink structure has been applied.

I had this same problem after changing hosting company and got them firstly to ensure that downloads.wordpress.org resolved properly on the server then I checked the file permissions on the various folders and found that the uploads folder (within wp-content) was set to 777. I changed this to 755 and it all seemed to work fine after that.