apache user, group and directories

f only one user is responsible for maintaining the site, set them as the user owner on the website directory and give the user full rwx permissions. Apache still needs access so that it can serve the files, so set www-data as the group owner and give the group r-x permissions.

chown -R eve contoso.com
chgrp -R www-data contoso.com
chmod -R 750 contoso.com
chmod g+s contoso.com
ls -l
drwxr-s--- 2 eve www-data 4096 Feb 5 22:52 contoso.com

If you have folders that need to be writable by Apache, you can just modify the permission values for the group owner so that www-data has write access.

chmod g+w uploads
ls -l
drwxrws--- 2 eve www-data 4096 Feb 5 22:52 uploads