I'm kind of at the end of my wits here and I hope someone can help me...

Now, first of all, I'm new to the whole VPS thing, so there are some growing pains there. However, I believe I've set everything up correctly and I cannot figured out why it isn't working.

First off; I am running CentOS7, with Apache with mod_rewrite enabled, MariaDB and PHP5.4 with all the necessary modules. Both Apache and PHP are running under the 'apache' user and group.

The installation files are directly in the /var/www/html/ directory, since I want to run it top-level. These files have been recursively chmod'ed to 775. They have been chown'ed to apache:apache.

When I navigate to install.php, I have green ticks for every prerequisite except writing permission. This is weird to me, since the user 'apache' is the owner and the permissions for the owner should include writing permissions.

Can someone help me figure this out? I have tried rebooting the server (i.e. restarting all services) and I have even reinstalled Apache, MariaDB and PHP from scratch, all to no avail. What am I missing here?

Thanks!