RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117485038738893225

i guess many people have memory holed the 2000s but PHP mostly took off because shared hosting with Apache mod_php was the only hosting out there. there literally was No Choice.

(some hosts allowed CGI but the new-process-per-request model with interpreted languages on 00s cheap hardware was super slow, and URL setup was hell)

VPSes appeared later, were much more expensive, and you had to be a sysadmin, and that was the only way to run other languages. Until "PaaS" happened and Heroku was the cool thing.. I remember playing with Google App Engine as a small kid, getting Google to just host my Python 2.7 apps…