I'm designing a new server setup for hosting multiple websites. (Shared hosting for my clients over at SliceHost.) I've recently moved away from the traditional LAMP setup and chosen Ubuntu, Nginx, php-fpm and mysql.

I like it a lot better then my old Apache, suphp, mysql setup. It works great, provided encapsulation between sites and uses substantiallly less memory. However I have one major maintenance problem. In order to have a recent version of Nginx and in order to use php-fpm I've had to compile these programs from source.

The reason I see this as a problem is that keeping track of updates, and build configurations will end up being a lot of work. For two programs (and a patch) I can handle it, but it seems like this setup would not scale with many packages and servers. Are there good ways to manage this situation? I'm sure people do this all the time.