Deployment issue

I'm having an issue with both Deploybot and Buddy when trying to deploy a laravel app on shared hosting, where site files are outside of the root. Both apps reach my server via FTP.

Here's the setup:

In ~/__buddy I have project and www folders. The former is the root of the laravel application. project/public is symlinked to ~/__buddy/www

When I deploy the app in to ~/__buddy/project, the system should follow the symlink ~/__buddy/project/public and put the relevant files (css, js) in ~/__buddy/www

However both Deploybot and Buddy fail to do this. Below is the raw log of Buddy. Here I made a commit that removed test456.txt and added test789.txt. It seems that it doesn't follow the symlink.

Listing files that will be deployed...

List of files is ready. Starting uploading...

Creating directory public...

Creating directory public/css...

Creating directory public/css/frontend...

Deleting file public/css/frontend/test456.txt...

Uploading file public/css/frontend/test789.txt...

Connection dropped by peer. Retrying...

[...]

ERROR: Uploading public/css/frontend/test789.txt file - Failed

Error: 550 __buddy/projects/public/css/frontend/test789.txt: No such file or directory

Deploybot support has no solution, claims symlinks are followed and that it's a permissions issue. Their chmod / chown solutions don't work. There's only 1x FTP user on the server that owns everything.

Does anyone have any ideas / tips / insights?