[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]
“When you’re running an Apache Web server for youself, you don’t
think about the user that’s running the Apache server itself
(typically nobody on Linux systems). But what if you’re an ISP
with multiple companies being hosted on your system? Or an
educational institution with a faculty who want to be able to
execute their own scripts? Either everything has to be accessible
to the Apache nobody user, or you have to run multiple instances of
Apache on multiple ports and IP addresses, one of each per user,
with the concomitant confusion of configuration files. The
solution is the use of the suexec wrapper, which is part of the
Apache distribution. Apache developer and pioneer Ken Coar
explains.”