Many? Which other than amazon and GCP? Honest question.

There was thousands of web hosting companies offering free hosting with PHP support. Even locally. It was what every 20 year old internet geek would do, starting a web hosting company. Granted, most of them were a security nightmare and had hours-long downtimes, or even days-long. But it was still a wonder world.

I recently talked to an old friend, and he mentioned that a website that I had put together back in 2002 was still up. I went and check, and there it was, almost two decades later, that website, along with two other that I hosted at the same hosting provider. Realistically speaking, I doubt any VPS instance I spin nowadays will be up 10 years from now.

PHP’s design, both easy and tightly integrated with web, allowed people with little to no programming experience to quickly get websites together

PHP was not the only language that allowed interleaved text and markup. Even the oldest systems had templating infrastructure that let you embed scripts in HTML, though typically they’d then interact with more complex components. Most users; however, did not need to write those components, they just treated them as things that were built into the language.

As to ‘little to no programming experience’, that’s quite a subjective thing. You needed to understand conditionals and loops to write non-trivial PHP. You needed to understand logical operators, string concatenation (what a string is!) and for non-trivial things you needed to understand structured data. We’re talking about a level of programming competence of someone who grew up in the ’90s with 8-bit BASIC, not the level of someone who is just doing HTML markup. Again, a lot of other systems required a similar level of competence. Quite a few had much simpler learning curves for people with no programming experience.

On top of it, PHP got into all the cheap, web hosts

I mentioned that, but you’re right. That is why PHP succeeded. If PHP hadn’t existed, do you think these hosts would not have offered something else? Most of them offered PHP + one or two other things, but PHP was the common platform. Most of the providers I remember from back then are out of business now. NearlyFreeSpeech is still around and, according to the Wayback machine, they offered C, C++, LISP, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and TCL + MySQL hosting in 2006, the first time they offered server-side scripting support at all.

I was on the executive committee and admin team for a student computer society around 2000 and, back then, the fact that we offered free web hosting with server-side scripting was a massive incentive for members (we charged £3/year initially and put it up to £5/year and it was still vastly cheaper just for the hosting than any alternatives that offered PHP or other languages). Email hosting was also a big thing: most people only had a university account and maybe one tied to their ISP (which went away at the end of the year when they moved house). Hotmail was still slowly taking off as an alternative.

It wasn’t until around 2005 that alternatives for web hosting became cheap enough that students considered using them and even then we were a lot cheaper. PHP was convenient but mostly because there were big marketing pushes behind it and it was what everyone else was using, so it was easy to get help. People doing computer science degrees were often asking for help with PHP (we had a talker and a support mailing list for helping people with PHP), so it definitely wasn’t as easy as you are claiming (especially a few years later once people learned about SQL injection attacks and discovered that their ‘simple’ PHP gave random Internet people full access to their databases). If PHP hadn’t been around, we’d have done exactly the same thing for some other scripting language.

Couldn’t agree more. My first big “project” was a car-pool sharing site in the late 90s. I was inspired by reading Greenspun’s “Database backed web sites” (great book, btw) and managed to get basic functionality going without much trouble using PHP and MySQL.

Many of these shared hosting providers offered CGI in up till 2000~2002, but that was a resource drain when compared to PHP

That’s not my experience (from running a shared-hosting server around 2001-2004). Back then, PHP either used CGI, or the Apache plugin. The Apache plugin did not offer user separation, so was not appropriate for shared hosting. You paid the PHP interpreter start-up cost for every PHP page fetch.

PHP+Apache didn’t get reliable FastCGI (which let you spawn one copy of the PHP interpreter per user, so you got useful isolation between users) until later. I think we deployed it around 2003 / 2004 and it was quite flaky at the start. Today, it works very reliably and once the Zend accelerator stuff was merged it gave a big performance win (you weren’t parsing the entire PHP script every page fetch, it was parsed once, compiled to bytecode, and interpreted on each invocation).

In terms of system load, we saw much higher overheads from PHP than stateful web-app development frameworks because every PHP request needed multiple round trips to the database (we were using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, because we liked our data and wanted to keep it), whereas alternatives (my favourite from that era was Seaside) kept it in memory, where it could be swapped out when the site was idle but then much cheaper to access when the side was under load. Java was a bit of a beast back then, but Perl was lighweight and offered FastCGI at about the same time (slightly earlier? Not sure, I didn’t use Perl).

I’d agree that PHP coincided with a growth in shared hosting and server-side scripting, but I disagree with the jump from there to that it caused this growth. There was a huge, thriving, ecosystem of people trying to solve the same problems. Once one player became slightly dominant in that market, it snowballed because people focused teaching resources on that language, optimised the interpreters, and gave discounts to people using it to try to attract a large customer base from competitors. That player happened to be PHP but it could easily have been one of hundreds of other frameworks that have since died out. And we’d probably now have long blog posts about how it sucks and doesn’t deserve to be successful.