var/www/html permissions

Hi, first post. I have no Linux experience. I have an e-friend that set me up a VPS and my website with Apache and FTP access so I could upload my files the way I do it regularly with my shared hosting. The OS in the VPS is Fedora by the way. Now the thing is:

http ://www.mydomain.com presents itself with a standard welcoming page from Apache/Fedora. When I insert an index.html inside the var/www/html I get a 403 Forbidden error. With my limited knowledge I assume this is a permissions issue so I go into the FTP and CHMOD it, however, no CHMOD works, it comes back as:

550 SITE CHMOD command failed

My understanding is that something isn't allowing me to CHMOD the html folder, however, I don't know if that's really needed for what I want to do, which is just upload my files (basically, my website) to the html folder. If there is a way to do this, I'm all hears :b: