As long as I’ve been running a box on linux, all the tutorials and documentation I’ve read have been geared towards integration with a control panel (line cPanel or Virtualmin or ISPConfig). That’s all fine and good, but when you’re operating a box from your house, or a VPS, you don’t want to pay for the licensing fees or have them installed as the memory hogs they can be. Not to mention the fact that many of them suggest that you run your user’s sites out of the /var/www/ directory – not exactly a recipe for success, in my opinion.
I’ve long preferred the standard method of rooting users to the /home/ directory. It works, and you can lock a user to their individual folder. Unfortunately, with the way most installations go, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to accomplish.