I had a job 5 or 6 years ago where I needed to maintain/add to a website using ColdFusion. I actually kind of liked it, compared to PHP. That said I wasn't doing anything especially complex, which might have changed my mind.

CGI yes, ASP certainly not.

ASP required a license. That alone made PHP superior for many people.

Cheaper definitely, superior not.

Why are the two separate? Of course you include cost when evaluating with option is superior.

Because to be superior, the tooling and libraries also have to be superior.

PHP was only free beer with a clunky language and 3rd class DB support.

MySQL couldn't hold a candle to real RDMS back then, versus what was available with ODBC connectors.

> Because to be superior, the tooling and libraries also have to be superior.

Perhaps that is your definition, but the dictionary disagrees.

Your dictionary definition I guess.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/superior

I don't see definitions about being cheaper as sign of quality, quite the opposite.

Maybe you would like to share your dictionary as well?

ASP was inaccessible for younger developers, tinkering with a linux box after school.

That is a very regional example.

Getting access to a Windows box was never a problem in countries with more flexibility towards piracy.

80 and 90's Portuguese students could get whatever they wanted from shaddy shops that used to copy books and software.

Booklets with 200+ items on them.

Classic ASP was terrible; if you're thinking ASP.NET then that did not exist at the time.

Using OCX from ASP, written in Delphi, VB and C++ Builder, alongside VB Script, was definitely better than PHP 3.

Shared hosts didn't let you use anything but VBScript and JScript. Using COM components was a non-starter for the majority of users -- which is entirely the point.

The ones that offered IIS instead of ASP via Apache surely did, depending on the price plan.

There is no ASP via Apache. ASP was only ever hosted on IIS and given the huge security implications of running custom binaries on IIS in a shared environment, it almost wasn't ever done.

I started doing ASP development before my web host suggested it was cheaper and easier to do PHP. They had both Linux and Windows shared hosting at the time.

Sure there was one

http://www.apache-asp.org/faq.html

I was only wrong regarding the language, it made use of Perl instead.

One esoteric library that was not mainstream. It's completely unrelated (and utterly incompatible) to Microsoft's ASP. I'm not even sure why you'd bother to bring it up -- what point does this make?

That PHP only got where it is today because of cheap hosting, down to the level of free beer, nothing more.

That doesn't explain how it beat a number of other technologies at the time -- including well established ones, like Perl.

Sure it does, cheap hosting. Many ISP only offered Perl with mod_perl, or telnet/cgi access, in the more expensive variants.

The cheapest of them all was PHP with files being dumped via FTP upload.