About 18 months ago I came to the realization that Rails just wasn't required for the projects I was using. I jumped on the Rails band wagon early and loved al

About 18 months ago I came to the realization that Rails just wasn't required for the projects I was using. I jumped on the Rails band wagon early and loved all the syntatic sugar that comes from Ruby, and I'd never really developed with an MVC pattern. Like you, I gradually realized I was spending more time as a sysadmin or bashing my clients' commodity hosting into submission than actually building sites. I felt like I was cheating when I finally went back to PHP (CodeIgniter, also). It wasn't til I rsync'd the PHP site I was working on to the prod server and saw it just work that I started feeling a bit better. Since then, I've been totally happy using simple but solid PHP frameworks. So, I think you're on the right track. Admittedly, I'm a little out of date on the state of Rails deployment. But if you're productive in PHP, go for it.