The pi zero's are great. I have a bunch of them. I used to use them as a tiny server for live webcams streaming to YouTube for customers, but YouTube now have a minimum sub count before you can go live, which sucks. These boards are pretty powerful.

The Pi Zero has 512MB RAM and a one GIGA Hertz CPU. It's a fucking super computer. Maybe not today, but not that long ago and back then people were running much more intensive things on them than hosting a website. It should be perfectly capable of handling TLS. AES might be a bit haeavy without hardware acceleration, but you can also do only ChaCha20 as the single supported server cipher. It would be easy to DDOS, but you should be able to mostly address that with firewall rules rate limiting connection attempts upstream.

I don't mean to shit on this, exploration is nice and putting perfectly fitting hardware to use instead of throwing abundant unnecessary hardware on every simple problem — just to bring it to crawl with loads of shitty bloates software — is good, but it's not particularly impressive.

Brilliant write up, just 1 correction, the TierHive VPS should only be $1.20 per year not $4 :)

For optimal moral support, have one of the spare Pis holding a sign, maybe "Pi is our guy"

People run websites on a VPS with 32MB RAM decades ago and it was fine. What is new about this?

In which country does OP live where their ISP permits them to host a website?

They are powerful little devices. I used a Pi Zero 2 with an ethernet adapter to host an x86 TrackMania² server using BOX64 and it never had a problem. Only swapped it out recently because I needed the Zero 2 for another project.

I mean yeah, but the Pi Zero can also do TLS and much more complex tasks so I really don't understand why this is such a big "feat." It's a linux pc just running a webserver. Am I missing something here?

Instead of having an open port in my router and sending data in plain text, I would use an ssh tunnel or a vpn. Or probably put the entire web site on the VPS.

So what benchmarks did you run or what's the advantage? Might as well just run the site on the VPS at this point since you're paying for it?