Comment by chatmasta

This was a much more compelling argument when shared hosting was still cheaper than a VPS with root access. But now you can get a VPS from any slew of providers, like digitalocean, for $5 a month. Root access computing has never been more accessible, and shared hosting is rapidly losing any value proposition it once had. So targeting PHP purely because it's more ubiquitous on shared hosting than Rails, is making less and less sense.