The reason was shared hosting. Most of the really good Perl options for application building used mod_perl which did not play well in shared hosting environmen

The reason was shared hosting. Most of the really good Perl options for application building used mod_perl which did not play well in shared hosting environments. If you could find a host, you were still somewhat at their mercy for getting modules installed, which was a huge pain in the neck. Conversely, PHP was trivial to set up for safe shared hosts. The end result was that Perl hosting was expensive and had a higher barrier to entry than PHP.