I have an Ubuntu 12 VPS and wanted to create a user account to upload and download my PHP code. So when logged in as root I created a user "chris" and then created a directory /var/www/chris

I want "chris" to be able to upload and run files to the /var/www/chris directory. Permissions for the chris dir look like this:

drwxrwxr-x 2 root chris  4096 Aug 20 03:35 chris

As root I created a sample file called abc.php and put it in the chris dir. It worked fine when I test it in a browser.

I logged in as chris and uploaded a file called 1234.php. That did not work. I just got a blank PHP page. The code was identical in both files. So it is not the code.

The permissions now look like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root chris 59 Aug 20 03:34 1234.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  49 Aug 20 03:21 abc.php

How do I alow the "chris" user to upload files and get them to work?