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.