By default, this shouldn't be happening. My guess is that this is an oddity with your hosting provider. I would also guess that the.htaccess
file is world writable. I would try making the .htaccess
file mode 644
like so:
chmod 644 .htaccess
or by using your SFTP program of choice to make it only writable by Owner. Then, whenever you modify the permalinks settings, just copy and paste the results at the bottom of the permalinks page into the .htaccess
file manually.
Just as a note: having the .htaccess
file world writable is a fairly substantial security issue on a shared hosting provider. Depending on how things are set up, it can be easy for someone on the same server to inject behaviours you don't want into your site by modifying this file.
Edit: I had 600
originally, which works for me because I have the .htaccess
file owned by the www-data
user on my server... but I should have said something about that. As per the comment below, 644
or 444
makes more sense in most cases.