No. You could give CGIs any filename, in any directory, on many shared hosting environments in the 90s. I know because I did it. Some shared hosting providers allowed persistent processes. Also, in the 90s, many small businesses self-hosted on tower PCs connected by fractional T1s. Many hobbyists self-hosted on dorm Ethernet (which had publically routed static IPs then) or got a corporate network administrator buddy to give them bootleg colocation.
PHP was successful because it was embedded in the HTML which lowered the barrier of entry. That's the only reason.
>Also, in the 90s, many small businesses self-hosted on tower PCs connected by fractional T1s
You were lucky you weren't on a 14.4 kbps modem sharing a phone line with the family, on a dynamic IP, and had an extra PC to devote to hosting a website which could stay on 24/7.
Oh, and weren't scared that someone would hack into your home network just for fun.
> Some shared hosting providers allowed persistent processes
Most didn't.
> PHP was successful because it was embedded in the HTML which lowered the barrier of entry. That's the only reason.
No. That's not the _only_ reason. Right now, unless $5/10 a month is too much, you can get root on a VPS on DO.
>PHP was successful because it was embedded in the HTML which lowered the barrier of entry. That's the only reason.
JSP also allowed Java code in HTML (The new syntax came later). Yet, it never took off (though being a memory hog back then definitely didn't help it).
PHP was successful because it was embedded in the HTML which lowered the barrier of entry. That's the only reason.