almost twice as expensive as cpanel so probably not going to, but was curious.

Naaa it all depends on how you purchase it...and if it's for a vps or dedicated server, if you are going through a hosting company, in most cases they can get you a decent price that is the same or cheaper them cpanel.

26/month vs 14/month, buying bulk time not as drastic but cpanel still lot cheaper for me.
the dedicated I am looking at does offer it free though but for now I am on no frills unmanaged vps.

Back the OP's question...one way to get more out of your server is to use nginx rather than apache.

Both have their place but I find nginx + php-fpm scales better and is faster than apache.