Having run my website on a Raspberry Pi for a while was a good experiment in low power consumption (9 watt) and a good improvement of the virtual machine I was running on an HP workstation ( 180 watt). However, the disk performance of a Pi is not that great (USB performance is actually better than the SD card) so I had already been looking for a good balance between performance and power usage.
After some searching, I’m now the proud owner of an Intel NUC (D34010WYB) with Intel I3 processor, 8 GB memory and an 128 GB SSD disk. Average power consumption is about 50 watt which is good enough for daily use.
Raspberry disk speed: Read 21,7 MB/s, write 12,4 MB/s
Intel NUC disk speed: Read 4,4 GB/s, write 1,3 GB/s (gotta love those SSD speeds 🙂 )
I have installed the system with Ubuntu 16, PHP 7 and Nginx (basic LEMP server) and performance is quite good 🙂