[geppetto]

I'm using a Cubieboard as a web server and I'm very happy. It's a 50$ Raspberry clone from 2013 with better specs (for the time). Consider that: - it runs mainline kernel and a regular debian distro - 5W max (but it's idle most of the time) - has good enough specs for a webserver (proper ethernet, 1GB ram, SATA support), works better than a cheap VPS

I run apache and some low-demanding webapps on it: - dokuwiki - miniflux (feed reader) - shaarli (bookmark manager) and it serves pages via my home DSL connection (with DDNS).

I did consider the alternatives - netbook/notebooks - but for my use case reliability, safety and power consumption would be much worse. These devboard is fanless and runs everything off an SD card. OK, SD cards are slow but on failure (never happened in three years!) I can just swap it with a (recent) cloned one with almost no downtime. I could use the faster onboard NAND but it did fail once on blackout and I went back to SD cards. I could even use a SATA HDD but I don't need that much storage.

So... it depends on your use case, I guess.