[tlianza]

> The ASP->PHP conversion was extremely low-hanging fruit (the conversion involved almost no logic).

This is where I'm curious that they didn't just start writing PHP from that point forward. It was already a cross-platform language. And, if I recall, had a lot of hype and was gaining traction fast I'm the late 90's and early 2000's.

Certainly hindsight is 20-20, but I remember a lot of folks betting big on PHP at the time.

[teh_klev]

PHP on Windows was comically bad at that time (~2000) - performance and bugs - which is especially bad for shared hosting environments. It wasn't until Microsoft's FastCGI for Windows 2003 and PHP 5.2 landed that we decided to roll it out on our shared platform. I speak from experience as an engineer/dev for a shared webhoster who was also on out of hours pager duty.