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I always thought the reason was that nearly every webhosting offers it, even though it has serious warts.

• mxuribe 5y ago
  Oh yeah, i agree that making PHP or other platforms more widely available helps them get more adopted. But i would have to guess that web hosting providers either were responding to customers requests to run PHP (because said customers felt they could do more), or these providers believed that php was good enough to offer to their customers because it empowered their customers but was not too much of headache to support. I say "not too much" because as noted, php has its warts. But even still if i put my business hat on, i would guess that a business would not purposefully make a platform available that is so bad which would create more work - hence tech support - that it would lessen or do away with any profit margin. In other words, if php were really that bad, web host companies - especially the low cost ones - would definitely not provide such a service because the constant tech support work would kill their profit margins...Full disclosure: i have never been a web host provider company (other than, small amounts of work in setting up web environments for my consulting clients)...so only someone in that industry could confirm/deny my theory.
  • emteycz 5y ago
    As a former small-time webhoster, I ran PHP because it was the easiest to run, but that doesn't mean it was the best app platform or the easiest to develop with. Making Ruby or Python or Java hosting was out of reach back then (without Docker and other niceties of today).