I’ve used lots of different boards. The Radxa Rock 3c is cheap and has decent performance, but the official OS support is a bit old. The Libre Computer boards are also good and have Armbian support. Libre Computer is releasing a couple more this year too. BananaPi has good options that aren’t expensive, like the BananaPi M5. Friendly Elec has some boards like the NanoPi R2C and R5C that aren’t pricey and have Armbian support. Any one of these boards are fine for a small home lab. Just boot Armbian, install Docker, and add your containers.
My current server runs on a fan less embedded Celeron board from ASRock, it runs really well... But since I've upgraded my desktop, I'm building a Ryzen server now
I haven't actually tried it since I'm still a beginner in selfhosting, but I was planning to buy a dedicated hardware for my homeland and my main two choices were the new Raspberry Pi 5 or some mini-PC like the one in this video I don't know if it could be similar to what you are looking for...
Not as cheap as the wyse, but probably way more powerful.
Framework sells a case to turn their mainboard into an SFF pc.
https://frame.work/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case-and-mainboard-kit
I know you want an upgrade over rPi but If you want a cheaper option, you can buy an android box and install linux on it. most of them have unlocked bootloaders. you can usually find a ready to use .iso on Armbian community forums by searching the SOC model there.
Personally I run a 5$ android box. it has a quad core cpu + 2GB of ram. I use it for hosting my music library on an external hdd and streaming 1080p video. I also set it as my vpn gateway. It's enough for my use case so I didn't upgrade it.
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