I've noticed this gap too, and started a (very alpha, experimental, and lately neglected) side project[0] that attempts to fit into this niche: a web server ori

I've noticed this gap too, and started a (very alpha, experimental, and lately neglected) side project[0] that attempts to fit into this niche: a web server oriented explicitly towards "mildly dynamic" use cases. In its current form deployment/updates are definitely not as easy as with shared PHP hosting (I have ideas for how to improve that eventually) and it probably won't scale well to lots of traffic or lots of dynamism (e.g. it spins off separate processes to handle scripting/computation, just like CGI does), but it's been fun to work on and I think helps me cope with the ennui I feel whenever I'm faced with the modern "best practice" of "let's make everything a SPA". [0]: https://github.com/mkantor/operator https://github.com/mkantor/operator