What are you talking about?I've never heard of SymLinksIfOwnerMatch and FollowSymLinks.
I'm talking about hopes... dreams... the magic of television. Especially public television. [...]
Only root user can access to root's directory. Notice that your server probably uses www-data user with www-data group permission and I guess you're running apache - please read about SymLinksIfOwnerMatch and FollowSymLinks to understand why they are needed.
You have three methods suggested by me:
1)
Move server files to for example /opt and don't run the server as root for security reasons*, then make a symbolic link to /opt instead of /root.
2) You can use cron to set simply task that will be executed every 15 mins which copies your server's database to your website directory, change permissions to www-data and is read-only. (more secure than the first method)
3) Use MySQL.
* - This refers to all options listed above.
