That's the thing right? With PHP you need a server or you can't do anything. With Django, Sinatra, Rails, Flask, (Node?, Meteor?) you have all that for development as part of the application.
To deploy you just push to a free heroku instance and you are fine until you get big. Much, much easier than setting up your own Apache+PHP. And much, much cheaper than buying hosting.
So many people point to Heroku as the comparator to the wide availability of PHP.
Unfortunately Heroku is down right now. The wide-availability of choice, it's ubiquity, is why many PHP sites are still running right now - they are not reliant on a single point of failure.
There are many thousands of hosts, spread across the world, offering Cpanel accounts so I'm not tied down to the meteorological events in North Virginia.
If an act of God happens in Michigan right now, I can switch my site very quickly from there to a freshly minted Cpanel accout in California (thanks regular Cpanel backups!), or London or Manchester (Possibly not Newcastle right now, though). I'm really spoilt for choice here.
What are the alternatives to Heroku that don't have the same failing that are running right now that are comparable in getting an app up and running equivalent to PHP time?
To deploy you just push to a free heroku instance and you are fine until you get big. Much, much easier than setting up your own Apache+PHP. And much, much cheaper than buying hosting.