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The big alternatives were: Perl if you had the technical chops and a host who'd basically let you have root access to the hosting machine (C/C++ worked this way
by pixelbath 7y ago
The big alternatives were: Perl if you had the technical chops and a host who'd basically let you have root access to the hosting machine (C/C++ worked this way too through CGI), ColdFusion which isn't really an alternative, ASP using VBScript which was wordy, complicated, slow, and gave almost no help to the developer (Provider error '80004005': Unspecified error) when a bug appeared unless it was during object initialization.
Once you could get Apache with mod_php set up, PHP felt like something you could use to actually get stuff done.