Hosting a website on a disposable vape

Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...

https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick

So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.

I've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere.

[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/

What an interesting gadget! It looks like it has most of the features of an Orange Pi Zero, but at around 1/5th of the price.

it's almost like everything matching the pi footprint is severely overpriced!

The original Raspberry Pi Zero was a good deal at $5 or even at $10. Too bad it was always poorly available and mostly bundled with overpriced dongles, power supplies, SD cards etc.