Q: $20? That's too much, you can find cheaper VPS providers!
A: I know, but servers with less than 2GB of RAM tend to crash the bitcoind daemon
Wrong I have a full node with 512MB RAM and 512MB Swap. Its never crashed.
Its not lots of RAM it needs, its swap.
Also $20 a month, is too much. I run mine for $15 a year at crissic.net
https://my.crissic.net/cart.php?a=add&pid=45RAM: 512MB
Swap: 512MB
Disk: 100GB
Bandwidth: 2048GB
IPv4: 1
IPv6: 16
$15 a year