FWWIW Ruby is my favourite language, but it's nowhere near being as beginner-friendly for web development as PHP. This is mostly because PHP was designed as an "embedded" language from the grounds up, and by the fact it's so widely supported by hosting providers. Most hosting providers have no support for Rails (or general rack-based applications); most that do, offer patchy support, though.

Furthermore, I remember a few years back, Ruby was a hassle to set up, especially on Windows.