[hu3]

Without specifics it's hard to understand what kind of difficulties you had.

But PHP is still so strong because it offers much more than "easy hosting".

What I personaly love most is the instant save file->see results feedback loop. There's no perceptible compilation step. Meanwhile my Java project takes a minute to compile.

Also the shared-nothing model by default is powerful and rare.

Laravel is probably the most well documented frameworks even comparing frameworks from other languages. And symfony, also a PHP framework, is not far from that.

When you say "SSL" I can only think your reasoning is based on outdated information since no one calls it SSL anymore. It's TLS for some years now. And I have been connecting to databases using PHP TLS/SSL since version 5. For almost a decade now.