[tyingq]

>As for php vs node etc - that hasn't been an issue for a long time. Node is supported everywhere.

I would guess what's being referred to for PHP is the ultra-cheap shared hosting where your account is running in the same OS instance as other people's accounts. You can get node.js to work, but it's harder to deal with since it's binding to a specific ip/port, and single ip addresses are shared by many customers. PHP has more options to make shared hosting look like a normal webserver to the outside. Shared hosts often use the LightSpeed webserver with "lsapi" that makes a shared webserver a little more configurable/performant on a per-account basis.