Ubercart

I have an UC 1.x site running on my VPS account and I keep my default memory limit at 96MB. I think you'd be pushing it to run a moderately complex site with a 32MB memory limit. I work with modwest.com for shared hosting, and they have a memory limit of 48MB. Even that has been giving me trouble on basic Drupal 6 sites since they've upgraded to php 5.2.6. They offer two "memory boosts" of 32MB each for $5/month, which makes a nice compromise.

If your production environment needs 96MB, then I'd plan on at least that much for your live environment. Imagecache does require a lot of memory if you're not careful what you upload. As do lots of modules and PHP extensions necessary to make a full-featured Drupal site.

Regarding the cost of VPS - it takes money to make money. The cost of a VPS is small compared to what most of my clients hope to make with their ecommerce sites.

And don't forget to take maintenance and administration into account. Do you know how to secure a Linux machine that's open to the Internet? It can be a constant effort, and I've definitely "paid" for my education with blood, sweat and tears.

Hope this helps!
Chris.

Based on my experience I'm 99% positive that 32M won't cut it for Ubercart. It somewhat memory intensive and loading that on top of other modules could exhaust that fairly quickly. You might look at other hosting providers like Slicehost who seem to get good reviews from other Drupalers.

32MB is not enough to do anything these days, but you should be able to get a VPS with much more than that for not a lot these days. I've been using http://OpenHosting.com/ VPSs and am very happy. Their VServer line doesn't have a specific amount of memory allocated - you can use up to (I think) 4GB as you need it (they call it utility pricing), and at least in my experience I never got charged more than the base monthly fee. Plus the support's been great as well as the uptime and performance.

Dan