ahah, when you're looking to get a shit ton of everything for cheap, you don't go to restaurants, you buy saver's packages at the local discount and fix it up yourself.

Regarding nodes, I guess you could get a server with enough RAM, storage space enough for one blockchain and then set up multiple nodes frankenstein system where only one writes to disk, and the others are limited to serving the blocks, I guess it could be feasible if you wanted to try.

A 2tb ssd is about 100 today or little more.