It takes real effort to run most of the LAMP stack as root. If you don't understand Unix permissions it's not easy. Apache, mysql, (and therefore php) all run b

It takes real effort to run most of the LAMP stack as root. If you don't understand Unix permissions it's not easy. Apache, mysql, (and therefore php) all run by default as a low-privileged user. I have plenty of real world experience and haven't seen apache or mysql run as root outside of embedded devices, and even that was maybe a handful of times.