Funny that this is trending for the first time on HN after all these years. FWIW, I was the original founder and developer. This started as a Perl script crawl

Funny that this is trending for the first time on HN after all these years. FWIW, I was the original founder and developer. This started as a Perl script crawling 8 local merchants' price lists and writing a single HTML file (some time in 1997), then turned into a CGI script reading flat text files (i.e. no database), then into a mod_perl handler. No complete rewrites at least until 2014 when I left the company. Perl got really unwieldy at some point, would not recommend (and my code was universally hated I guess). By the way, geizhals.at (the original domain) was in the top 2000 Alexa websites for a few years (somewhere around the years 2000-2004) AFAIR despite being from a very small country.