yeah, it depends on the specs of your server, but you should be able to run a node with minimal resources. There's no need to mine on the node, so that'll limit the CPU load, and you can modify the download and upload speed, and you could even modify your setup so that you don't have any incoming connections - you could simply do this through the firewall. There might be a setting as well.
You'd definitely want to run the recent head, so you'd have to compile.
But yeah, if you thought you would need to run the 6 gb memory version, than I agree, it would be best to not run the daemon. But the database version is much lighter.