Some server configurations may not have or allow you to upload to any folder that is not part of your server tree. If that is the case, you can usually modify the .htaccess file so that it does not serve anything in your connections folder (but the PHP parser ignores .htaccess and will still access the script).

To get even more tricky, if you use a customized error 404 page, you can change the 403 error doc (shown to anyone who tries to access the connections folder) to use your custom 404 page instead. Just add a line to the top of the error page to change the header to 404 and casual observers should not be able to tell.

Also, for troubleshooting, do you have any level of command line access to the server? Unfortunately some PHP installations do not give much (or any) feedback when there are errors, and the only way to find out what the problem is is by running it through a PHP interpreter on the command line.

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