2) Most likely the web server is running as effective user (and group) nobody instead of a dedicated user (e.g. www-data) and a group of the real owner's account (or some other constellation or ACLs that suits the hoster's setup and gives the account owner control). Some may claim it would be "for security purposes" but it is rather a misconfiguration and even may be dangerous if more than one services run as nobody; a service that creates files should not run as nobody at all. It might also be that a NFS tree export has no or a broken user/id mapping in which case all files are owned by nobody (and a web server running as nobody would be even worse then). Talk to your hosting provider. As is, only root could change file permissions, but that alone would be fiddling with a symptom instead of curing the cause.