PHP became successful when hosting companies began offering cheap PHP hosting. PHP runs on low cost servers with very little memory,so hosting companies could p

PHP became successful when hosting companies began offering cheap PHP hosting. PHP runs on low cost servers with very little memory,so hosting companies could put many customers on a single server. It was then just a matter of uploading a few files via FTP to have a working website. .Net deployment, Java deployment were always more complicated and expensive. It was also easy for administrators to deploy Wordpress or Drupal, with next to no PHP knowledge whatsoever. That feature (ease of deployment) was often underestimated by other solutions, until the PAAS era. Could PHP have been made better language wise while keeping the same features absolutely, but PHP was not taken seriously by people who could have fixed it early on.