PHP is a problem for everybody and very few want to admit it. It's a bad language, poorly designed, and it's become the de facto entry level language insuring a vast supply of bad coders and worse code, but it sure does run everywhere... It doesn't even really make all that much sense. With all of the security problems inherent in PHP as a "platform" there are many commodity "web hosts" that will provide PHP support but not something much more useful and secure such as ASP.NET or Python or Ruby. (Then you have the ouroboros loop that everybody supports PHP because everybody "knows" PHP and everybody "knows" PHP because that's the only thing supported...) It's almost a travesty of mass proportions, and something of a major setback to the science of computing. If you can read PHP but can't read a legible language like Python, then you need your head examined. Period. End of story. If you prefer a mess of spaghetti code over a plainly architected system, you have no business even being involved in programming. You certainly have no merit to any business of mine...
Personally I gave up entirely on PHP "programming" over a year ago, and you would have to do a lot to get me to ever even touch that language again.