WP Posts & Pages result in Page Not Found? (to do with htaccess and permalinks?)

Hi guys, my site is located at https://ppz.890m.com/index.php …while this is a new site, I’ve been using WordPress for my personal blog for years and am quite familiar with it. However, this installation is on a different host and I seem to be having problems. My problem is that while I can see the main page, when I (or anyone) tries to click a post entry or page, it results in a “Page Not Found” error on the server (404). I looked it up and as far I know it has something to do with the permalink structure as well as this .htaccess file.

I have my permalinks setup to be organized just by post name “/%postname%/” …and this is how I want them to appear but it doesn’t work.

I was reading on someone else’s forum that they fixed it by using this: “/index.php/%postname%/” …and I tried it and it worked, but I’d really prefer not to have to include the index.php in the URL.

Other people were talking about mod_rewrite in .htaccess; I have a .htaccess file in my main directory, but it is currently empty. I am quite unfamiliar with how this file works, so if you must explain something to do with it, please explain it clearly as best you can what I need to do.

Thanks a lot to anyone who can help, I’d really like to figure this out…thanks! =D