Nah, it was too CPU intense. In addition, even though disks haven't gotten significantly faster since then, filesystems were a lot less advanced, and disk, virt

Nah, it was too CPU intense. In addition, even though disks haven't gotten significantly faster since then, filesystems were a lot less advanced, and disk, virtual memory and CPU caches were much smaller. PHP did develop quickly in order to optimize the performance of serving scripted web content. Besides its own performance enhancements it also relied heavily on database storage for content, which significantly improved performance for complex websites. But it was mostly useless to people with just a homepage and guestbook; most web hosters would not provide database access without charging, and most web devs needed a higher level of technical competency to use them. A lot of websites were run by people who only knew front-end programming and markup languages.