Comment by papsosouid

>PHP is easily and inexpensively deployed on commodity hosting.

So is everything else now that dirt cheap VMs are the norm.

>PHP has a large base of existing documentation that can be learned to get up to speed on it.

Much of which is wrong or even dangerous.

>PHP has a large base of existing developers whose knowledge

A large number of developers, but most of them possess a shockingly small amount of knowledge.