Back when I hosted Perl (Apache, mod_perl, "LAMP stack") websites for a living our standard server build looked remarkably similar. We hosted websites for hundreds of concurrent users on each one.

- Dual Pentium-II CPUs

- 512 MB RAM

- 100 Mbps wired ethernet

- Red Hat Linux

Mass storage was larger, but not by much, and the flash eMMC is probably faster than the spinning hard disks we used back then.

My middle school was right in the midst of a technology purge when I was in 7-8 grade (so around 11-13-ish?) and my friend and I found a bunch of towers chucked in a dumpster. Seeing as we lived within walking distance, we got as much as we could in to an old wagon and carted it to my house.

Did one of the towers catch fire? Absolutely. We also cobbled together a couple of towers with literally hundreds of megabytes of storage, probably something along the lines of 32MB of RAM, and all of the 16.8 million colors our CRTs could handle. I ran a PHP server for about two weeks on the brand new cable connection my bad begrudgingly paid for because everyone else needed the phone, and within that timespam my logs got spammed with hack attempts and I moved to some random DynDNS host and scrapped the server for parts.

I received a second hand dual PII-450 system and was mind-blown at how much more responsive it was than my single core P3-900. I had set it up in a server role and as long as it didn't start swapping it was way quicker to respond to queries under load than any other system I'd used to that date.

Yes, it is quite capable. For $10 the stick is amazing compared to how much that setup cost back then.