> PHP is only a bad choice is you have really complex requirement and need a high level of reliability, which most Web projects don't. I think Haskell fills a good niche here. It is really underestimated.
Actually I find PHP projects to be more reliable to host than stuff written in Java, the lingua franca of business projects. Constant worrying about heap sizes, garbage collection, resource leaks or your entire server crashing because of some exception somewhere... you don't have anything like that in PHP (with the exception of memory_limit, which is fairly rare to hit in a decent hoster), simply because of the shared-nothing architecture of PHP.
Actually I find PHP projects to be more reliable to host than stuff written in Java, the lingua franca of business projects. Constant worrying about heap sizes, garbage collection, resource leaks or your entire server crashing because of some exception somewhere... you don't have anything like that in PHP (with the exception of memory_limit, which is fairly rare to hit in a decent hoster), simply because of the shared-nothing architecture of PHP.