I worked for an ecommerce startup in 1998/1999 that was founded in 1997. The app was built in Perl with (by 1999) a MySQL backend.

But there were definitely applications for building larger websites, including ColdFusion[1] from Allaire and, infamously, Broadvision[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadvision