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> WordPress benefited from the fact that PHP hosting was always cheaper (even free) than hosts that supported Perl or Python (this was a little before Ruby beca

> WordPress benefited from the fact that PHP hosting was always cheaper (even free) than hosts that supported Perl or Python (this was a little before Ruby became popular through Rails). You could find oversold hosting plans for as little as $1,99/mo. Why was/is that the case?

kristopolous 13y ago
I'm guessing it's the "oversold" portion. There's probably quite a few "idea people" out there that are paying the monthly fee for their facetubebay[1] idea and are just looking for the right technical team to work for the equity. Really. I bet most people that are buying a perl site are actually doing things with it and the vast majority of people that paid for the PHP site either have a static splash page or no page at all and just don't bother calling up and canceling the $2.00/month fee for that idea they had in 2009. There's 188 million active domains. 188 million. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-s... ... if took any skill to buy a domain and pay $2.00 a month for hosting, godaddy would have been out of business a long time ago. [1] I like that facetubebay.com is actually registered - and by the owner of a restaurant chain (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477), how fitting.
pallandt 13y ago
Perl too 'niche', Ruby too new at the time I would presume, but pretty much every host supported/had to support PHP, if we're making abstraction of another niche, ASP/ASP.NET. However, if I remember correctly, PHP plans were always cheaper than anything else.
- btilly 13y ago
  Actually in the late 90s, Perl was not niche. If you wanted to be on the web, you needed Perl. That is why Microsoft paid to have the original windows port done - they had no hope of competing in the web server market unless they could run Perl on Windows!
chc 13y ago
You could get "good enough" support for PHP just by turning on mod_php. PHP was literally made for this. It was a little more work for hosts to get the same out of Perl or Python or Ruby.
- btilly 13y ago
  More work than you indicate. The problem is that you can turn on mod_php and run 50 virtual domains on one webserver with 50 different people in control of each ones. But if you turn on mod_perl, it expects to have complete control of the server, so you needed one web server per mod_perl server. That made shared hosting for mod_perl massively more expensive. Of course you could do CGI scripts in any language. But that has more overhead. That made them both slower and more expensive (a cost the hosting providers passed on).
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    agreed, although most shared hosts I see are running PHP as CGI (or FCGI) anyway. But, PHP got popular precisely because it didn't demand complete access to the entire server request cycle (unlike, say, mod_perl).
tmzt 13y ago
There are shared web hosting options from major providers that support RoR via FastCGI, I've also used them to support NodeJS without shell access.

kristopolous 13y ago

I'm guessing it's the "oversold" portion. There's probably quite a few "idea people" out there that are paying the monthly fee for their facetubebay[1] idea and are just looking for the right technical team to work for the equity. Really. I bet most people that are buying a perl site are actually doing things with it and the vast majority of people that paid for the PHP site either have a static splash page or no page at all and just don't bother calling up and canceling the $2.00/month fee for that idea they had in 2009. There's 188 million active domains. 188 million. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-s... ... if took any skill to buy a domain and pay $2.00 a month for hosting, godaddy would have been out of business a long time ago. [1] I like that facetubebay.com is actually registered - and by the owner of a restaurant chain (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477), how fitting.

pallandt 13y ago

Perl too 'niche', Ruby too new at the time I would presume, but pretty much every host supported/had to support PHP, if we're making abstraction of another niche, ASP/ASP.NET. However, if I remember correctly, PHP plans were always cheaper than anything else.

btilly 13y ago
Actually in the late 90s, Perl was not niche. If you wanted to be on the web, you needed Perl. That is why Microsoft paid to have the original windows port done - they had no hope of competing in the web server market unless they could run Perl on Windows!

chc 13y ago

You could get "good enough" support for PHP just by turning on mod_php. PHP was literally made for this. It was a little more work for hosts to get the same out of Perl or Python or Ruby.

btilly 13y ago
More work than you indicate. The problem is that you can turn on mod_php and run 50 virtual domains on one webserver with 50 different people in control of each ones. But if you turn on mod_perl, it expects to have complete control of the server, so you needed one web server per mod_perl server. That made shared hosting for mod_perl massively more expensive. Of course you could do CGI scripts in any language. But that has more overhead. That made them both slower and more expensive (a cost the hosting providers passed on).
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  agreed, although most shared hosts I see are running PHP as CGI (or FCGI) anyway. But, PHP got popular precisely because it didn't demand complete access to the entire server request cycle (unlike, say, mod_perl).

tmzt 13y ago

There are shared web hosting options from major providers that support RoR via FastCGI, I've also used them to support NodeJS without shell access.