Coupled with the fact that anyone who can use an FTP client can just throw up a copy of WordPress onto a shared hoster and get going....PHP+MySQL is ubiquitous

Coupled with the fact that anyone who can use an FTP client can just throw up a copy of WordPress onto a shared hoster and get going....PHP+MySQL is ubiquitous in this market. In fact, it's even easier than that, many shared hosters run automatic installers that grab the latest WordPress and unzip it into your shared host website htdocs folder and it's just point, click, bish, bash, bosh...you're good to go. Fancy selling your home made widgets? Just add WooCommerce which supports the most popular payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, WorldPay etc). And provided you stick with plugins and themes that are well known, well maintained, play nice with the official WordPress hooks, get security updates, and keep on top of WordPress updates it's reasonably secure. Sure, WordPress may not be "sexy" but for non-developers you can get a lot of things done in not a lot of time.