I think PHP's strength is coming from the large amount of web hosting companies offering it. It seems to be the "default" they offer, along with MySQL. Also, those hosting providers are so cheap that for some it is the only choice that they have (including myself).

While I have been learning Python for over a month now, I still do not have a server to run my stuff on. I run it on my local machine but it feels different when you have it "out there".

After a month of looking at and learning Python, I fell in love with it. Bottom line, if web hosting companies offer Python as one their "default" installations, then I would directly jump right in.

Python is nice because it has great web frameworks available - and at the same time, I can use it as tools to parse my huge CSV files (and other tasks) while I'm offline.

Python is a very "comfortable" language to learn - I never had that feeling when I tried to learn Ruby.