Back in my day you could get an app that doubled your RAM. No memory modules required.

You could mount a cloud storage device as a pagefile, which would be a convoluted way to "download more RAM"!

Yes, there are some significant technical hurdles to jump through and it'd be impossibly slow, but it can be done!

Bad psu checks out

It's still not that common to have one die. Servers have ECC memory which can get you by longer even as a DIMM starts to die. It's also rarely run at speeds consumer RAM is run at.

The thing with server memory is when you get to point where you have hundreds of servers and each one has 12 to 24 DIMMs the chance you have a bad one somewhere increases.

Power supplies and batteries, if we’re including laptops.

Am I the only one using memtest after every time I handle RAM?

I'm running mine on a ~$33/year VPS at GreenCloudVPS. It's a small instance (just me) but it federates with all the major instances which means it still does a bunch of work (since it has to handle incoming posts and comments from federated servers). It's a decently powerful VPS with an AMD EPYC Milan CPU, 10GB RAM, and 100GB NVMe storage.

For a medium-sized instance, I imagine you could get pretty far with a single <$100/month dedicated server from Hetzner or a similar provider.

I am under the impression it's dedicated hardware not a VPS, but it's leased from Hetzner they don't maintain the hardware themselves.

I've tried a few variants out and they all have their own benefits and drawbacks, but I kinda settled on Mbin with Interstellar on mobile (though the website works fine in Firefox mobile too).

They don't do well on the better moderated instances, thankfully.