In reply to jteague.

We've used a number of different control panels and hosting stacks over the years, including Virtualmin with an nginx stack. High performance certainly but a real pain in the neck on which to do admin work. In performance terms, no better than commercial Litespeed with cPanel.

Rolling one's own is lovely. We wrote all kinds of plugins for Wordpress to do basic issues, even like forms (actually John Godley coded it but mostly when working at Foliovision). The forms plugin is called Filled In. It's enormously powerful. It's not particularly easy to use for non-technical people. We've just made the move over to NinjaForms as it's so much easier for our clients to make attractive forms with reasonable validation.

The point is that rolling one's own is a hobby if there are better commercial solutions out there.

We tried to move away from cPanel (and mostly did). Performance was about equal between our optimised nginx Virtualmin stack and Litespeed/cPanel. When I did the accounting on hours vs costs of Litespeed plus cPanel, Litespeed/cPanel was ahead by dozens of hours every month.

Basically rolling one's own/open source ROI was negative in this case, while commercial software saved us a huge number of unbillable hours which could then be used on billable work.

In most cases, rolling one's own is like making your own wine or building your own car: hugely inefficient. That's my lesson from the trenches anyway.