I do host a DD2 server. You can DM me for whitelisting if you are interested.
There is a public spawn base, which is community owned. I think 416 may be the only one there at the moment, but I built it originally to make a safe place to get started. Timelord also contributed to it too. The public spawn has always been a place for players to team up and make progress together in a shared environment. If you like that play style. =]
Myself and several other regular players choose to make our own solo bases far away from spawn. We play a server because we can barter, share knowledge, help each other out on occasion, etc. Just often strong personalities have their own play styles or pace and so they want solo bases. There is plenty of room, we have a dynmap so you can view areas of the world no one has made a base near. I encourage people to try and leave a kilometer at minimum between bases so everyone has space.
DD2 I use 6G of RAM with and it performs nicely.