>Was it because of shared hosting That played a huge part in things, yes. PHP and ASP gained a huge part of their popularity because they were designed to fit

>Was it because of shared hosting That played a huge part in things, yes. PHP and ASP gained a huge part of their popularity because they were designed to fit into existing shared hosting setups, so everyone could rely on them being available anywhere and everywhere. Hence mod_perl, mod_ruby, mod_python, etc. to try to get those languages into the same space. Now that virtual machines are the norm it is a lot easier to use whatever you want.