Nginx – Centos / vsFTPD / Nginx / php-fpm – Permission denied (500 Internal Server Error)

I have a clean Centos 6.4 (x64) minimal edition installed (fully updated).

Once the OS was setup, I followed this relatively simple guide to setup my FTP:
http://www.krizna.com/centos/how-to-configure-ftp-server-on-centos-6/

SELinux is disabled.
anonymous_enable=NO (vsFTPD Config)
chroot_local_user=YES (vsFTPD Config)

instead of creating a linux local user acc on /ftp/[username] (as per guide), I opted to use the standard location of /home/[username] where [username] was server (in my setup)

I tested my FTP Server and it is installed & running fine/. So I logged on to FTP and created a folder called "public_html" and then created a index.php file inside it with <?php phpinfo(); ?> code in it. ( So full path is : /home/server/public_html/index.php )

I then installed nginx & php-fpm and proceeded to create the following configuration files for each in this order.

/etc/php-fpm.d/server.conf (php-fpm pool for my local nix acc: server):

[server]

listen = '/var/run/php-fcgi-server.sock'
listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1
user = server
group = server

pm = static
pm.max_children = 5
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 10
pm.max_requests = 200

php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/php-fpm/server-php-errors.log
php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on
php_admin_flag[display_errors] = on

/etc/nginx/conf.d/dev-minecraft.local.conf (nginx vHost):

upstream serverbackend {
    server unix:/var/run/php-fcgi-server.sock;
}

server {
    listen *:80 default;
    server_name dev-minecraft.local;

    root /home/server/public_html;

    location / {
        index index.html index.php;
        try_files $uri $uri/ @handler;
        expires 30d;
    }

    client_max_body_size 10M;

    location  /. {
        return 404;
    }

    location @handler {
        rewrite / /index.php;
    }

    location ~ .php/ {
        rewrite ^(.*.php)/ $1 last;
    }

    location ~ .php$ {
        if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite / /index.php last; }
        expires        off;
        fastcgi_pass   serverbackend;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include        fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Now, if I visit the site no my browser : http://dev-minecraft.local/ I get the following error: 500 Internal Server Error

And I see the following errors in my /var/log/nginx/error.log file:

2013/07/22 12:58:07 [crit] 2039#0: *1 stat() "/home/server/public_html/" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 192.168.1.15, server: dev-minecraft.local, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "192.168.1.54"
2013/07/22 12:58:07 [crit] 2039#0: *1 stat() "/home/server/public_html/" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 192.168.1.15, server: dev-minecraft.local, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "192.168.1.54"
2013/07/22 12:58:07 [crit] 2039#0: *1 stat() "/home/server/public_html/index.php" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 192.168.1.15, server: dev-minecraft.local, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "192.168.1.54"

Any idea what I am doing wrong here?
One thing I noticed in WinSCP (after i login via FTP), the file owner/group is set to a numeric identifier (500) instead of the account username "server". Is this the reason why nginx/php-fpm is unable to access the site files? How can I fix this?