I’ve started using cPanel on my main box, as well as some VPS accounts for a couple of customers. I never really enjoyed using a “Control Panel”, but ever since moving to cPanel I’ve actually enjoyed the experience. Previous to cPanel I was mostly using scripts I’ve coded in perl, which worked well. But there was no way to provide the users with control without writing lots of lines of code. Why re-invent the wheel?
Before cPAnel I use to run Apache2/mod_fcgid/mpm_worker with an entirely custom configuration. cPanel comes with something called EasyApache, which allows you to go step by step through how Apache and PHP will be configured and setup. It will download the required source and then build, all automatically unless something breaks which is rare.
EasyApache supports mpm_worker and mod_fcgid, which builds and works for the most part. The only exception is the fact that are issues with mod_fcgid/2.3.5 that seems to leave left over PHP processes. These processes sit idle while eating up memory, eventually if you have enough of them your machine will run into “OOM\Out Of Memory Errors”. Which is ugly. I have a post up on cPanel’s forum:
http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/lost-abandoned-php-processes-apache-2-2-17-mod_fcgid-2-3-5-suexec-180571.html
There has been a suggestion to upgrade to mod_fcgid/2.3.6 which I’ve done and still seem to have