I did a lot of PHP over the years, trying to migrate over to a Python web stack.
A big hurdle is ops dev. All hosting services support PHP out of the box.
Now I'm faced with the "distro choice". Which server do I use (lighthttpd / nginx / tornado)? Which framework (django / flask / web2py / cherrypy / pylons / pyramid)?
Like the original author, I've had a VPS sitting unused for 2 months paralyzed by choices. I eventually decided on nginx / flask, but haven't had the time to set it up. Maybe I should have just used Heroku. shrugs
The same choices exist for PHP, although you may not be aware of them. PHP runs on all the servers you mentioned, and there are many, many frameworks in PHP (although admittedly not quite as many as in Python).
Just choose one and learn it. They're all excellent web servers. I'd recommend going with Flask or Django in the beginning, simply because they have the best documentation. web2py also has pretty good documentation. The only problem with Django and web2py is that they are monolithic. If you don't like their ORM, or templating engine, or authentication/authorization, it's generally hard or impossible to switch, and if you do switch you lose all the benefits of the integrated system. With Flask and Bottle, on the other hand, you are free to pick and choose components. I think the same modular design approach is used by Pylons and Pyramid, but I'm not sure since I've never used them. But as you learn more, there's a lot to be said for being able to switch out components of your framework, or even writing your own in a pinch.
A big hurdle is ops dev. All hosting services support PHP out of the box.
Now I'm faced with the "distro choice". Which server do I use (lighthttpd / nginx / tornado)? Which framework (django / flask / web2py / cherrypy / pylons / pyramid)?
Like the original author, I've had a VPS sitting unused for 2 months paralyzed by choices. I eventually decided on nginx / flask, but haven't had the time to set it up. Maybe I should have just used Heroku. shrugs