RAM is cheap, and the rest of the box costs more than the RAM, so I'd say no.
Let's say a 1GB module costs $25 and a 4GB one is $40. (Just picking some random Corsair ones of compatible specs and disregarding things like using matched pairs of lesser capacity instead of single modules. For simplicity.)
Two of those 1GB modules would already cost more than one 4GB one. And that's to say nothing of the rest of the hardware, which you can entirely avoid if you have a single system instead of four.
The only place it makes sense is VMs through a cloud provider, where memory is often one of the big pricing metrics. It's possible there could be savings through some of those providers.
That's true for this scale, and probably up to 32GB or so. But bitly is running at much larger scale and he is talking about hundreds of GBs, which is a totally different game.
Let's say a 1GB module costs $25 and a 4GB one is $40. (Just picking some random Corsair ones of compatible specs and disregarding things like using matched pairs of lesser capacity instead of single modules. For simplicity.)
Two of those 1GB modules would already cost more than one 4GB one. And that's to say nothing of the rest of the hardware, which you can entirely avoid if you have a single system instead of four.
The only place it makes sense is VMs through a cloud provider, where memory is often one of the big pricing metrics. It's possible there could be savings through some of those providers.