What would it take to run 50+ alt coins as well as Bitcoin daemons on say a VPS or even dedicated server?
Is it possible to create a payment system with this many currencies supported, all from one server? Or would you need multiple?
This is theoretical, but I want to put it into practical use in the future
I think it would depend on the server and the alt-coins and the rest of the software you intend to run. You'd want to beware having hot wallets on the server of course. But with a generic selection of alts, plus bitcoin, one could probably handle it, IF it was a server like one of these:
For example, a 224GB RAM, 32 Core, 500GB SSD (or 2TB SSD) server could probably handle it. A server like that would not be cheap (around 1700/month at DigitalOcean). At Amazon EC2 (32vcpus, 244 GB, 640GB SSD range, d2.8xlarge would run about 23616/year).
So for someone with the money to invest in it, it is doable. A low-end VPS with 4GB of RAM or even 8GB of RAM wouldn't be a machine I'd try it on.