Lemmy doesn’t really need much resources. Sopuli is running on a Hetzner VPS with similar specs and it’s all fine. I remember someone even running an instance on a ROCK64! Can’t really say anything about running multiple Fediverse services on the same VPS though.

That’s more than enough for when you’re just starting an instance. I’d even knock that down to 1 core 1 GB RAM, which is like $5 a month on a host like Linode or DigitalOcean. The reason Lemmy.ml is experiencing trouble is that it’s one of the largest instances, we didn’t have problems until recently. The great thing about a VPS is that you can upgrade whenever you want, so I’d recommend saving some money by getting the cheapest one until your instance starts getting a lot of users. Every VPS host I know of shows you the resource usage history, so you can monitor it once in a while and upgrade when one of the stats is getting close to 100%.

I have an instance running on a 1GB RAM server.

It’s just for feature development, but it runs smoothly.

I think that should work fine, never seen Lemmy on a dedicated server go above 2GB RAM use, but mileage may vary I guess.

On the other hand, I know Lemmy can run on a raspberry pi.

Clearly more than whatever lemmy.ml is running