I can't stand PHP anymore. What else can I choose?
SwellJoe: Unfortunately, the reality is that PHP is dramatically easier to ship out to crappy shared hosting providers than any other language.  Perl, Python, and Ruby are easy if you just use CGI...but they are increasing degrees of slow (with Perl generally being the fastest of the lot and Ruby being the slowest, when used in a pure CGI configuration).  Perl is definitely the second most deploy-able language after PHP, due to its historic popularity, but it is still way behind when it comes to "untar the directory and everything just works" style deployment.  And it isn't necessarily going to be fast in the types of Perl deployments many shared hosts allow.Someone suggested Java, which is way out at the farthest end of the "hard to deploy on shared hosting" scale.  In fact, I doubt you can find any way to host Java effectively for less than $25/month, and probably more if your app is at all popular.  It's just a horrible choice if deployment is a big factor in your decision-making process.FastCGI is getting easier and easier to get in shared hosting environments, and all of the major web app frameworks in all of the major languages support it (including Catalyst in Perl, Ruby on Rails in Ruby, and Django in Python).  Since FastCGI is a better way to run PHP in a shared hosting environment (mod_php has serious security implications), as well, I'd recommend you start insisting on FastCGI support from your host, no matter what language you use for development.So, I think what folks ought to be recommending is that you go with a host that provides FastCGI and shell access.  And then you can decide which language(s) you want to experiment with.