[luckylion]

I know that Perl was earlier, I've worked with Perl before PHP came around. However, I've never seen a shared hosting environment that offered mod_perl, they were all using CGI.

Might be region specific, I've mostly worked in Western Europe, but even the two NA-based providers I've used back then didn't offer mod_perl for shared hosting.

You could certainly get it on a managed server, or set it up yourself on your dedicated box, but PHP's strong suit was the low-end shared hosting options. It ran anywhere, and usually fast.