It's very simple. We needed to begin somewhere, and until we've had at least 10-20 active users which load our database with their analytics queries, we wouldn'

It's very simple. We needed to begin somewhere, and until we've had at least 10-20 active users which load our database with their analytics queries, we wouldn't require a lot in terms of compute power and speed. However, we do have electricity stability problems sometimes (and internet outage), so something which has its own battery and ability to switch to a backup wifi/lte was a great choice as a start. So that laptop was a "free server" we've had. It's now replaced by a much beefier miniPC.