In the mid-00s the main selling point of PHP were shared hostings with mod_php which was a cheap way to host your own web site and database.
Now with the cloud that advantage is utterly gone.
Now with the cloud that advantage is utterly gone.
Python 1.0: January 1994
PHP 1.0: june 1995
Ruby 1.0: December 1996
Granted, it still happened about a decade and a half ago, so I hoped the sarcasm using the word "new" would come through.
It did ;-) . But I frequently meet devs (young and old) that believe Python, Ruby and others are "new" languages. So I think it's worth mentioning they are not in any way.
Of course age does not equate maturity. Neither social acceptance.
With the advent of Chinese frameworks that solve C1000K problems like swoole, workerman and so on it even found its place as high performance interactive backend server.
If you look at the "multiple queries" results of the web framework benchmarks, you'll notice that the frameworks that use blocking database drivers have similar numbers e.g. raw Symfony is 13,543, whilst Spring is 15,979, despite the JRE being much, much faster.
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...
I have the same access to my shared hosting, and the amount of money per year is peanuts.
https://murex.rocks is a static site that costs me pennies each month and has zero scaling issues. The site is fully automated too, built from CI/CD (Markdown converted to HTML) upon commits to a master git branch. But it was purposely designed to run on the cloud.
This isn't to say that shared hosting isn't a worthwhile option, just that cloud can be cheap albeit you do need to architect your project for using the cloud rather than lifting and shifting your existing LAMP stack and expecting that to behave the same.
The big win of those will be tighter frontend and development integrations that are just not as feasible with a different language stack (PHP/Laravel, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails).