Permission denied website errors after editing user chown

Hello, I'm a new owner of a VPS and therefore have little experience with this level of root access. I've been a front-end developer for years and recently moved from shared hosting to a VPS. I run CentOS 7 x64. I worked mostly through SSH using Putty. I have installed NodeJS and Composer (php packet manager), to install Composer, I had to create a non-root user for security reasons, as Composer stated (third party packages get the same permissions as the user installing it). This user is called 'alan', and was added to a new group 'admins'. Furthermore, I gave 'alan' ownership over /home/accountname using the command chown -R alan:admins /home/accountname accountname = my hosting account, in which public_html is present. Composer was installed with this account without issues, NodeJS was installed with the root account. I believe that ever since the chown command, I have messed up file and folder permissions. SSH and WHM works just fine, but the cPanel gives different errors such as: The system failed to create the file "/home/accountname/.cpanel/datastore/.tmp.70657.MOUNTS_CACHE__proc_mounts" with permissions "0600" (as EUID: 1001, EGID: 1001) because of the following error: Permission denied In an uneducated attempt I set the ownership of /home/accountname to root:root As of now: accountname chmod is 755 public_html chmod is 755 public_html's .htaccess chmod is 644 folder chmod is 755 upper-level files are chmod 644 What can be done to fix cPanel and access to my websites?