I'm still reading up on this, but I'm very curious as to the tradeoffs between this and a Linode or Slicehost or other VPS system. Seems this would have the advantage of a lot more capacity, and while I'm not sure of the performance of the CPU it should be essentially guaranteed. If you just keep it for a year, and consider the $140 for the plug a total write off, this comes to about $16 a month.

Is this a good deal compared to VPS offerings? It seems like it would have to be, unless the CPU is very slow.

Amazon micro instances are close, but you can't run a web service from them since they can lose their CPU for seconds at a time (as I understand it.)