I was running into a frustrating permissions issue when trying to setup FTP access for various users. They couldn’t follow a symlink to the /var/www/sitefolder for their respective vhost.
I worked around this by making their www sitefolder their HOME directory for their user account. As the user exists purely for the website then this was an effective workaround.
useradd -d /var/www/sitefolder username
Now when logging in via FTP I am greeted with the respective www files and can upload and download accordingly.