In the event that your file/directory permissions are changed under your account for any reason and you need to reset them to the correct defaults you can do this with a few clicks in the FileZilla FTP Client and most other popular FTP clients:
1) Connect to your site via FTP, SFTP, or FTPS in FileZilla. Navigate to your "/public_html" directory in the "Remote site" section. Select all directories and files inside there.
2) Right click on one of the selected items and choose "File permissions..." from the menu. Enter "644" in the Numeric Value field, select "Recurse into subdirectories", and then choose the "Apply to files only" option. Click OK to apply the changes and wait for the changes to be applied.
3) Repeat step 2, but this time enter "755" in the Numeric Value field and choose the "Apply to directories only" option. Click OK to apply the changes.
4) For any script configuration files (such as Joomla's configuration.php file) manually set the permissions to "640".
5) Your permissions will now be set correctly. Note that you should never attempt to set your permissions to 777 even if documentation for a script says that you should, it's not required with the way that our servers are configured.
You won't need to modify the permissions in your home directory, just the ones above. Changes to permissions in your home directory can prevent your email and other account features from working. Your /public_html directory permissions should be left at 750.
