The n280 is specifically limited since it’s 32-bit, but low powered machines can be useful regardless. Two of the servers in my empire of dirt are atom d2550s, and I’m even able to run proxmox on them (since that model is 64-bit), but in terms of bare metal, they were able to run Matrix conduit, ejabbered, a nostr relay, and for a while my searx and yacy instances. (Though as I recall the cpus lack of instructions eventually stopped me from running searx on that hardware) I think I was even able to run invidious.
If it’s just for you, it would surprise you how much you can do with a very small amount of CPU power.
Another thing that a machine like that might be useful for is a jump box. You can just put a very light distribution on it, and make it accessible to the outside world and one way or the other (secured of course) so you can hop into it if you need to do any remote administration.
The one thing that I found when I was using stuff that was particularly low powered is drive latency matters a lot. If you are using an SSD for storage, even much faster processors end up spending a lot of time sitting there waiting for the spinning hard drive to get to where it needs to be so you can be a lot more efficient with less CPU power.
I’ve got a similar problem at home, and I use a really straightforward solution: since the problem manifests on my pcs, I just add my services to the hosts file. It’s particularly good when I’m working on my next cloud, because sometimes you end up with a lot of data moving back and forth, and you don’t really want to hit your router to hit the outside world to hit your internal server when you don’t need it. I just sent it to resolve my main services to the internal IP address, and the best part is that even when the internet is down and DNS isn’t available, my services keep on humming away. I might not even realize.