PHP is a big reason for WordPress doing so well, because it's everywhere, it is cheap to host (as in you can stick a whole heap of PHP sites on one box and it w

PHP is a big reason for WordPress doing so well, because it's everywhere, it is cheap to host (as in you can stick a whole heap of PHP sites on one box and it will generally be fine) so it's cheap to get hosting. My product (http://grabaperch.com http://grabaperch.com) is a CMS - I guess a competitor to WordPress, although we're certainly not trying to be WordPress. We're PHP and MySQL because that's what our target audience has available. We would not have been as successful as we have been had we written it in Python, Node, or Ruby or anything else. The content editors using the CMS, and the website users do not care what the software is written in. Most of our actual customers (web designers and front-end developers building client sites) do not care what the software is written in as long as we make it easy for them to get it installed. Successful with a CMS product doesn't have to mean that you kill off the competition. There is plenty of space out there for products targeting a bit of a niche, or just those who want an alternative for whatever reason. If you can figure out what that reason is, what problem isn't being solved by the main players, it's possible to build a product that serves it.