In my opinion it has more to do with shared hosting. PHP (and MySQL) have been included with just about every shared hosting plan on the planet and is IMHO the main reason behind the popularity of PHP in general. I used PHP (and still need to) for years to that very reason. It isn’t until you actually need a long running process that you move on to greener pastures, like Python, node.js, and (now for me) Elixir.
There is a project that was started a while back but it hasn’t been updated in a good while: Contento
