Hacker News Reader

This is outdated, I can find you a handful of hosts that offer Perl, Python and Ruby for under five bucks a month.

Sure, they exist, but these other languages have nowhere near the ubiquity of PHP in the economy webhosting world. PHP devs have plenty of choices.

Is your webhost's DNS/email/DB service just not quite what you need? PHP devs can take their pick of a very wide selection of competing services.

Please back up what you're saying with some proof. As I said, PHP is no longer the most ubiquitous economy hosting language.