Not sure what you are into but PHP is anything but painful to work with. It's the easiest to get started, cheapest to run, and frankly when you actually use it

Not sure what you are into but PHP is anything but painful to work with. It's the easiest to get started, cheapest to run, and frankly when you actually use it for what it is intended, output web pages, I fail to find better. At the end of the day, if you keep it simple you can go far without ever needing to do much maintenance and scaling. Most failure to scale I've seen come from bloated code base and code written by people who are not PHP developers.