My ISP changed the hosting for my Wordpress blog and everything stopped working. There was a DNS issue but they resolved that, but then every page apart from the home page returned a 404 error.

Checking the permalinks page (`/wp-admin/options-permalinks.php`) in wp-admin I saw the following:

> If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all.

Adding what it listed fixed the problem but got me wondering.

Should the `.htaccess` file be writeable - at least for wp-admin?

I know that the file should **not** be writable for everyone and I would keep the permissions as restrictive as possible to keep things secure, I'm just interested in making my life easier.

However, I note the that the permissions on the file are:

    rw-r--r--

So making the file file writeable would inevitably make it less secure.

I can manually make edits through the ISP's file manager interface so it's not as if I *can't* update the file at all. It's just that it could get to be a pain if I have to keep doing this.