It's often overlooked that many of the cheap hosting companies who provided the environment for PHP's phenomenal growth only offered PHP as a CGI. You often had

It's often overlooked that many of the cheap hosting companies who provided the environment for PHP's phenomenal growth only offered PHP as a CGI. You often had to pay a lot more if you wanted mod_php because it was harder to secure and required more resources. PHP/CGI was the way to max out the number of users on a server even it was slower.