The Blue-and-White G3s are nice machines for desktop productivity with Mac OS 8 and 9. I have either a 333 or 366 in my storage locker and it's a nice, solid machine from the time. It's definitely on my list of machines to pull back out and set up with a nice display at some point, to just use with Mac OS 9 software.
A beige G3 server would also make a great ASIP5/ASIP6 machine, or if you had some need for the Mac OS 9 management functionality of the original "Mac OS X Server 1.x," that release.
Unfortunately, I can't imagine WordPress will be anything other than really slow and painful on a 333MHz G3 with an old IDE or SCSI-2 disk for storage, even if you do get 768 megabytes of memory in it. Adding faster storage will help, but those PHP web applications are just going to be a real hog on CPU resources.
For comparison, I was running mediawiki (x2), wordpress, and the old phpBB version of this site on 256 megs of ram and I rarely swapped, but it's also got access to four modern Xeon cores, so the speed was never the issue.
On, say, a 1.3GHz Pentium M with 768 megs of ram, the same configuration is "acceptable" -- I wouldn't go much slower for that type of task.
333MHz should be fine for hosting static HTML files and doing light shell-box work, IRSSI, alpine, vim or nano, and that kind of thing.
Also, consider this another vote for using BSD or Linux for that task. Mac OS X 10.5 has a lot of security problems today, which are technically resolvable, but it's going to be an untenable uphill battle, and if you're not already an accomplished UNIX/Linux system administrator and/or programmer, you're going to end up spending a lot more time on it than I think you're ready to, especially given that it's a Mac, and that sets certain expectations.
A beige G3 server would also make a great ASIP5/ASIP6 machine, or if you had some need for the Mac OS 9 management functionality of the original "Mac OS X Server 1.x," that release.
Unfortunately, I can't imagine WordPress will be anything other than really slow and painful on a 333MHz G3 with an old IDE or SCSI-2 disk for storage, even if you do get 768 megabytes of memory in it. Adding faster storage will help, but those PHP web applications are just going to be a real hog on CPU resources.
For comparison, I was running mediawiki (x2), wordpress, and the old phpBB version of this site on 256 megs of ram and I rarely swapped, but it's also got access to four modern Xeon cores, so the speed was never the issue.
On, say, a 1.3GHz Pentium M with 768 megs of ram, the same configuration is "acceptable" -- I wouldn't go much slower for that type of task.
333MHz should be fine for hosting static HTML files and doing light shell-box work, IRSSI, alpine, vim or nano, and that kind of thing.
Also, consider this another vote for using BSD or Linux for that task. Mac OS X 10.5 has a lot of security problems today, which are technically resolvable, but it's going to be an untenable uphill battle, and if you're not already an accomplished UNIX/Linux system administrator and/or programmer, you're going to end up spending a lot more time on it than I think you're ready to, especially given that it's a Mac, and that sets certain expectations.