I am skating dangerously close to a flame-war, I know.
If you are interested in making web applications and know a little programming already. PHP is a great choice. The vast majority of open source web applications are written in PHP. Essentially all hosts support PHP. In honesty, deploying a Rails app can be a real pain. I still develop a lot of my systems in PHP because of these facts (although I am steadily moving over to pure Rails development).
However, if you are interested in learning programming and making a long-term career as a programmer, and not necessarily in a purely web-based environment, then Ruby or Python are great choices. Both of these languages are pure object languages and well-designed, nicely thought out and consistently structured. Both languages have some really nice meta-programming features that will stand you in good stead later down the track. If you can meta-program, you can do anything. (MetaProgramming is basically using code to write more code:
Metaprogramming) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Mayo: I'm interested to hear what went wrong with Rails. I *adore* Ruby and Rails.