Back when the entire web was like this, simple websites would be hosted on 50-200 MHz single core machines with RAM in the megabytes. So I don't mean to come of

Back when the entire web was like this, simple websites would be hosted on 50-200 MHz single core machines with RAM in the megabytes. So I don't mean to come off as confrontative but if you can't host a text-based website on a quad-core 1.5 GHz machine with 8 GB of RAM you're doing something seriously wrong. As for setting things up, if you can apt-get install apache on any generic Linux box, you can do it on a Raspberry Pi.