Multiple independent wordpress installs – 1 dedicated server – individual dedicated domain for each install. What is the best way to achieve this?

What you need is Virtual Servers, that way you can redirect each domain to a specific wordpress installation (see Apache for that). To achieve the db side of it, you just need to hace a prefix for each wordpress installation (that’s part of the setup).

In my case I’m not using cpanel, I have an AWS EC2 instance with LAMP and 4 wordpress installation working perfectly with apache’s virtualserver.