Magento

My hosting company www.helpinghandhost.com tell me Magento must be installed in a sub folder, not my site root, to be sure the connect feature works and that it’s something on Magento’s end that is the problem.

Anyone shed some light on this or confirm the problem for me please?

Best wishes
Lee

The script that will download and install PEAR packages from magento connect should have write permission to Magento root folder.

If your host is using mod_php and will not let you change permissions for your public_html folder to be writable for apache user, you will not be able to use MagentoConnect online Manager, if Magento is installed in web root.

However, if you have SSH shell access, see this link for information:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/upgrading_magento#using_ssh_shell_access

As you will be logged in with your regular user, file permissions will not present a problem.