I use PHP for my day to day as well. The community and the language are both very active, tons of cheap reliable hosting, well known and understood performance

I use PHP for my day to day as well. The community and the language are both very active, tons of cheap reliable hosting, well known and understood performance and scaling profiles. PHP is easy to get wrong but not all too difficult to get right. The one thing I like about PHP more than anything is the lack of abstraction, there is no "response" object you are writing to, you want 'some-crazy-tag-with-weird-attributes' you don't have to trick your library into outputting it, everything is just strings you echo out. With the glut of web frameworks for PHP (CakePHP, Symfony, NOLOH, etc.) you can go full blown MVC fairly easily. I prefer to work with Flourish http://flourishlib.com http://flourishlib.com as I find it to be the perfect core for a website.