You’ve got a VPS or some other managed (re: non-shared/reseller) server where httpd runs under the user apache. Apache, however, isn’t an active user, so you can’t upload your files in that name, resulting in an eventual “403: Forbidden” error on the front end.

There are probably better, more secure alternatives, but you can add your user to the apache group and then use setfacl to allow users in that group access to the folder. From then on, you can FTP, git push, etc, to your heart’s content!

# add your user to the www-data group
usermod -a -G apache admin
# set the write permissions for the group on the web folder and contents
setfacl -Rm group:apache:rwx /var/www/com-domain-www
# set the default write permissions for the group on the web folder moving forward
setfacl -d -Rm group:apache:rwx /var/www/com-domain-www