I have an FTP user set up that is chroot'd to his own directory. This is set up in vsftpd. The user has no shell (/dev/null), so no ssh access, but does have a home directory (/home/ftp/user/)

This is all working just fine.

But I'd like to also give the user access to his own web directory (e.g. /var/www/html/user/).

I created a symbolic link from within the user's own FTP directory (/home/ftp/user/symboliclink). The link shows up in FTP, but can't be clicked on (no doubt due to chroot).

Is there a way to make an exception for the symbolic link?

Specifically, the user should be able to access the /var/www/html/user/ directory via the symbolic link.

The user should not be able to see everything below his own html/user/ directory, but nothing above it.

Why dont you change user's home directory from /home/ftp/user to /var/www/html/user instead of creating symbolic link ?

Because this user needs to be able to download database backups, and I don't want those files online

What about creating an html directory inside the user's home directory, and then making a symbolic link to that inside the www directory?

Nice idea.

Tried it, and ran into the same problem with the files in my includes directory. These are in a different tree to apache's root.

I don't want my generic includes directory inside this client's FTP tree.

Hmmmm....

Okay, that's the setup I use on my server. If you're using apache, You may need to add "Options FollowSymLinks" in suitable places in your httpd.conf.