I am using the Ubantu stack with WordPress on Bitnami. Everything works great. However for certain plugins - at installation time certain files do not get written (mainly log files). I have contacted the plugin vendor and they say that have thousands of users using their plugins with no problems and suggest it is something to do with my hosting provider.
To rectify the problem I have had to manually create blank files, ftp them into the appropriate plugin directory and set the file permissions to 777. Then everything works as expected and the log files are written to. Since some of the files contain personal data passed from PayPal it is not acceptable to set the permissions to 777.
So my question is: why is it that for certain plugins the Bitnami configuration prevents files from being written at plugin install time (and the appropriate associated permissions set) while the vendo claims that on other wordpress hosted sites there are no issues?