Run other websites on the same machine as Discourse

A question:

Is the socket template (with nginx.http.sock in the conf file) a must if I want to setup other websites running on the same standalone server along with discourse?

We’ve recently migrated server and we ended up using port 8080 and nginx as reverse proxy but without using the socket template. Since it is working ok and I don’t see the point of using that method I would like to know if there’s no other way.