Here are some results of my first day running a full Bitcoin node on DigitalOcean.com. Unfortunately, it is not possible to run a full node on the $20/mo instance, you need the $40/mo 60Gb VM Debian image.

* Download the Linux binary from bitcoin.org (it's an old 0.10.2 version)
* Let it sync (this takes more than a day on two cores, over 40Gb of data to check)
* Reboot once and run it for a day
* Disk usage settles at 50GB or so
* Memory usage will grow to fill up to 60GB, but at least 1GB is enough for normal operations
* CPU has a very low demand but usage spikes around high tx traffic, otherwise it averages 8% of ~3GHz
* Load is slightly higher than expected, mainly due to running munin in the background
* Network traffic averages 300kbit down and 64kbit up, very light as the connection can handle 60Mbit
* Unconfigured node connected to about 22 peers
* The biggest slowdown is the storage, but with SSD this is greatly reduced

In summary: bitcoin-core is just as painful to sync as it was last year even with growing technological advancements (something we need to fix specifically for Bitcoin), the memory usage is a bit higher than expected, CPU is mostly sleeping but it is needed to relay transactions quickly and the network is absolutely no reason to worry about (from my perspective). While I was expecting to get by using only 20 dollars, we need to look for cheaper providers to accommodate the blockchain or switch to slow boring HDD.

There are no special settings for relay fees or other settings (although my node banned only blockchain.info for spam). More live details:

* Bitnodes.io node status page
* Munin pages on the actual node