I wonder if the better course of action would be to lobby the major hosting providers to include Ruby and/or Python with their base plans. Really, isn't that one thing that keeps PHP chugging along? In the consulting work I've done, my clients already have hosting plans for their website, so if I'm adding a sub-app, or even a new app, trying to convince them (and their IT staff) to manage multiple hosts/plans/etc is off the table.
I think the problem is that the virtual hosting model doesn't work well for platforms where every site is a running app instance. Who starts the processes? How do you restart them when the code changes (some platforms don't do this)? Who assigns port numbers? etc etc etc.. With PHP, whose execution model was kind of built with this in mind, this works out of the box very easily.
