[rwmj]

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform.

If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.

[pavlov]

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible".

Well, yes, but I was hoping someone would put it more eloquently, so thanks :)

I can't see what the target market is. The I/O is going to be terrible for hosting files. And 32-bit ARM is at a disadvantage for anything more computationally intensive (as you pointed out).

Maybe there's a group of users out there who have been thinking for years: "If only I could have my old smartphone colocated in a data center"...?

[kryptiskt]

Pretty niche, but they would likely be good for running CI for ARM. Or just for offloading tests to, it would be much better than emulation.

[lazyjones]

> I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this?

People whose web pages generate a lot of traffic (10TB allowed) with low CPU usage, i.e. static pages and similar.

[MichaelGG]

>People whose web pages generate a lot of traffic (10TB allowed) with low CPU usage, i.e. static pages and similar.

Surely such cases are better served by offloading to a CDN. As much as I hate centralizing to one company, CloudFlare nails this pretty damn well.

[jaysh]

Wouldn't those users be better served by a $5 VPS? They're cheaper per-month, have no setup fee, and probably even get provisioned quicker.

[lesingerouge]

I will try to test if those "servers" would be good for task processing. Example: let's say I have a ton of websites to crawl (high IO, not much CPU, ideally parallel). I could use a couple of these to cheaply do the job.

I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.

[rwmj]

I have an Odroid XU [1] which is similar to this. For 32 bit ARM it's actually not too slow, but I/O is terrible with an SD-card. There is an optional eMMC card which improves the situation, but IIRC there's no option to use an SSD. Note the server advertised here isn't quite the same so YMMV.

[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/odroid-xu-arrives/

[brianwawok]

Would it beat a pair of $5 VMs from digital ocean though?

[lesingerouge]

I could think of an application in which there would be minimal disk interaction and just lots of network action and in-memory processing so hypothetically it all depends on how the CPU handles parallelization through its cores.