Your comparison is invalid and irrelevant.
You're comparing writing a simple PHP script on a remote server to deploying a full Rails app. Please do the same comparison with Rails vs Symfony/ZF and then we'll talk about it.
When I used to be a Ruby developer, every time I heard that "PHP is easy to deploy", I made a less-than-one-minute demo showing how to create a Sinatra app from scratch and deploy it on Heroku is just few commands (any Sinatra dev here can do it).
When I used to be a Ruby developer, every time I heard that "PHP is easy to deploy", I made a less-than-one-minute demo showing how to create a Sinatra app from scratch and deploy it on Heroku is just few commands (any Sinatra dev here can do it).