I was having issues setting up an SSH key pair, something I have done a few times before and isn't too complicated. I kept on receiving

Permission denied (publickey)

It turns out the folder on the remote server I was placing the public key in was wrong. The issue was that the users home folder was unusual. The username was cookieMonster yet the user's home folder was located at /home/cookie_monster instead of what I had expected, /home/cookieMonster I realized this as I was browsing the /etc/passwd file.