I was having a problem with WordPress where I could not upload any documents to my website via posting and I could not activate Akismet or change Appearance or Themes. Basically, I could not write to the backend even though my MySql account had full privileges in the database. I got the following error message when I tried to enter my Akismet key:
Akismet The key you entered could not be verified because a connection to akismet.com could not be established. Please check your server configuration.
The problem was that Apache did not have read/write access to the blog website.
The solution was to change the owner of the blog from root to apache the restart the web service.
sudo chown -R apache:root /var/www/html/blog/
sudo service httpd restart
Once I did this my errors went away.