Plesk vs. ISPConfig on a vServer

[Been Told]

Hi everyone,
I'm renting a vServer on Hosteurope with 2GB RAM (4GB Burstable) and it's got Plesk 9 preinstalled.
I'm going to run a forum and gallery software on it which are probably going to require a fair amount of computer power. So I'm looking for a way to administer that server with a tool that has as small a memory-footprint as possible.

Having positive experiences with ISPConfig, I would like to switch to that. But what do you guys believe?
Or should I go for something else? Maybe not even Apache but lighttpd?

Basically my question is, how do I get the most out of my vServer? I don't even mind having no GUI if there is a how-to somewhere that I can use to set everything up.

[till]

ISPConfig has most likely a lowe memory footprint then plesk. But if you want to run just one or two websites and no email accounts and want to get best performance for the websites, then better use a manual setup without controlpanel. In this case I would consider to use nginx or lighttpd and not apache. Take a look here for setup instructions:

http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-nginx-with-php5-and-mysql-support-on-debian-lenny
http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-lighttpd-with-php5-and-mysql-support-on-debian-lenny

[Been Told]

Hi till,
thanks for that info. There will only be that one site (two domains), but there will also be two or three e-mail accounts and some forwarders.
Would you still recommend going with Nginx or Lighttpd?

[till]

If you run other servers as well that might be used for the email accounts of these domains, then I would go with Nginx or lighttpd. If the email accounts shall be on the same server, I would use ispconfig.

[Been Told]

I could just use Google Apps for e-mail... So I'll give Nginx a try and see how far I come, thanks :)