PHP succeed precisely because of how it executes .php files directly as scripts from a single running instance. This allowed it to be the shared hosting solutio

PHP succeed precisely because of how it executes .php files directly as scripts from a single running instance. This allowed it to be the shared hosting solution because it uses far far less resources than a similar python solution. Python is great if you want to run your own server or VM per site. It's not so great if you want to run a shared server and it's shared servers (not VMs) that brought the price down and therefore opened the floodgates of allowing people to run their own sites cheaply and easily.