Before the last refresh, they could actually be quite powerful little servers with the i7 option.
I think a lot of people over-estimate the resources they will require (and either end up paying huge amounts for an over-provisioned service, OR end up locking themselves into an 'infinitely scalable' cloud provider that they never end up scaling.
http://www.macminivault.com
https://www.macstadium.com
There are plenty more choices, those were just the first few I found.