Ask HN: I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose?

All my clients use shared hosting such as iWeb.com (which does'nt have Shell access). Mainly because they don't want to pay a lot for a _reliable_ webhost.

My problem is : As a language-snob (i know, it's sad), i'm immensely bored about PHP. I want to learn another back-end language that i can use on my freelance web jobs.

I'm considering learning Perl. But Perl needs modules to extends it's possibilities, this i cannot do without Shell access. And it's also better to run it as fastcgi or mod_perl, things that shared hosting does not always support.

I know Ruby, but hosting Ruby is not cheap enough, or accessible enough for my clients.

Do you guys have any idea of a web stack or shared host that does the job?

What do you do when you can't stand PHP anymore?

In my experience Windows hosting (I'm aware of a Linux-compatible version of ASP.net, don't know how good it is might even be for classic ASP) is a bit more expensive than Linux hosting (which is typically used for PHP - for compatibility and cost reasonings).

Using Python would have the same problems as using Perl, wouldn't it?

Is Ruby hosting that expensive? I've seen hosters that do it under five bucks a month (like http://www.hostingrails.com/ ).

I don't think you should dismiss a language so fast for hosting reasons. Yes, they are a thing to consider, but "The Thing"?

We offer all our clients hosting on our slicehost server, for at least a year free (so far we haven't bothered to ask after a year either). It's clean, fast, cheap, and lets you do development and updates much faster. No system administration to speak of (long live apt-get).