I am opening this thread to get an idea of how many people might be interested in this idea. We are currently building a new web hosting company from scratch using custom code for our billing/checkout system plus a custom coded openvz control panel. Our platform runs on Gentoo Linux with custom kernel builds instead of the standard CentOS/RHEL deployment that many webhosts currently use. We've decided to take our platform a step further and extend the same 'from scratch' concept to our shared hosting platform. Our shared hosting servers will run nginx + php-fpm (with per user socket connections for security and stability) instead of the standard apache+mod_php or litespeed webserver configuration. We are even able to offer a fully integrated control panel called Froxlor (which is a fork of SysCP) that already supports this type of platform quite well. We feel that this platform is superior in many ways including performance, stability, security, scalability, etc. How does everyone else feel about this kind of web server configuration?
Most people are used to cPanel, so they will most likely stay with cPanel. How do you think you can compete with that fact? Who wants to use a completely new platform when there's already an established, highly popular one?
