But drush is still changing permissions to 750 on the root > > directory on the remote server. This disables the site until I > > reset the permissions to 755.

 
> DocumentRoot should never be able to be read by others.  Drush is
> doing a good thing here.  The DocumentRoot group should match that of
> the user id executing httpd.  This would allow the httpd user to read
> the DocumentRoot directory with 750 permissions.

  Thanks Ernie. I will contact the hoster for the appropriate way to
  handle this.
  cheers

Sorry for not using the exact terms, of course it is user - group - other
where
"user" == file owner and
"other" == the rest of the world.
In filezilla for example it is called owner, group and Public permissions, but this all boils down to the same point:

You should not have to make a file world/public/other - accessible if you want to keep your pants on ;-)

So right now maybe the file has the following denominations:
drwxrwxr-x daniel daniel yourfolder
which means that the group and owner bits are daniel
if I want to change it to make it accessible not the world/other/public then I have to set it
chmod 750
Now apache cannot access it, so I have two options:

I chown the folder (and subcontent - use with greatest care):
chown -R daniel.www-data yourfolder
This would be the option that you choose if you have a shell access or someway to change the group of your files.
I just add apache to the group daniel (not recommended)

(and yes, technically speaking it is user (u) group (g) and other (o) as in the bash-script that I use to correct my drupal permissions if I messed something up see http://mentalitea.com/drupalpermissions.)

Daniel