Nginx 403 forbidden for all files

I have nginx installed with PHP-FPM on a CentOS 5 box, but am struggling to get it to serve any of my files - whether PHP or not. Nginx is running as www-data:www-data, and the default "Welcome to nginx on EPEL" site (owned by root:root with 644 permissions) loads fine. The nginx configuration file has an include directive for <i>/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf,</i> and I have a configuration file *example.com.conf*, thus: server { listen 80; Virtual Host Name server_name www.example.com example.com; location / { root /home/demo/sites/example.com/public_html; index index.php index.htm index.html; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/demo/sites/example.com/public_html$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; } } Despite public_html being owned by www-data:www-data with 2777 file permissions, this site fails to serve any content - [error] 4167#0: *4 open() "/home/demo/sites/example.com/public_html/index.html" failed (13: Permission denied), client: XX.XXX.XXX.XX, server: www.example.com, request: "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1", host: "www.example.com" I've found numerous other posts with users getting 403s from nginx, but most that I have seen involve either more complex setups with Ruby/Passenger (which in the past I've actually succeeded with) or are only receiving errors when the upstream PHP-FPM is involved, so they seem to be of little help. Have I done something silly here?