I am running a web server on mine using PipaOS and Lighttpd, but I rewrote my database system to SQLite instead of MySQL. Granted, this meant I had to reimplement some stored procedures that I had written in PHP instead (for parent/child page traversal and navigation building) but it returns pages much faster. I know that reading from a file all the time is likely to harm the attached USB drive's read count, but I'm not getting many hits!

I intend to rewrite the system using C++ instead (using an old Mongoose C++ web server edition) and load the SQLite database into SQLite :memory: (without a disk backup) instead, which means that it'll return pages much faster; it'll only touch the "disk" database on program startup.

I see from the others that they have put PHP and MySQL and a host of other things on theirs but for simple sites, that is probably somewhat overkill.

I also use mine as an SSH gateway.

If your site will serve only few static pages and you going to have less as 500 unique daily visitors RPi should be fine. But if you run some heavy framework like Wordpress and will have more as one visitor at once RPi cant handle.

I used it to serve files via http, and it was very poor at it. I would not recommend using it as an http file server. Light application use, or for things like hosting git repositories works well though.

I'm running my girlfriends portfolio page on a Pi, nginx + mysql + php / Wordpress with a caching plugin. Works quite well if the pages are cached (which most are), admin stuff is quite slow.

My RPI number 2 runs owncloud+nginx and Bittorrent sync. Well it's not fast but i can live with it. PHP-APC helped a lot.

I am running nginx on my RPi at http://pi.tafkas.net/

Tried, but can't do any heavy stuff.

Ive used it to run an openvpn client on which connected/bridged two WiFis over internet and forwarded igmp packets and multicast (not broadcast). Worked fine, so that my DLNA (minidlna) server could be reached and play movies on a Samsung smart tv as if the minidlna server was on the same wifi as the tv, but it was in fact in another city.

Streaming HD movies in this way - flawlessly. 30mbit up/down conneciton on the minidlna+openvpn server, and 24mbit down 1mbit up ASDL on the Samsung tv receiving end.