that is a good question because some 3 years ago I got kicked OUT of my VPS plan with 1and1 for excessive usage bz my gallery2 install of course I had other files as well and also decent traffic but the real usage sucker was gallery2 for your 10k uv per day - if you have large format pics such as I do with lots of 1600, 1080p or 1920px photos you may most likely fill one complete dedicated server = 1 or better 2 drives ( most dedicated servers come with dual sata anyway = dual core CPU = 4 GB RAM currently I have some 19+k uv/day and run 3 servers for one site, with dual core x86_64 and 4GB RAM each working server and that is just fine and nothing too much at all !! my gallery however takes only 25% of total traffic - rest is wallpapers, ecards, blog, forums and lots of flat file content so I would guess that if you have one complete server properly optimized ( cache ) that would be enough unless you have MANY files larger than 1MB or lots of mpeg / flash files in your gallery. I have refrained from any video content just for that reason - I would need even more power and thus exceeding my proportions $revenue vs expenses.
Dual core xeon/pentium 2-4gb of ram 100mb uplink sata drive(s) If your in need of a dedicated server, i highly recommend ThePlanet.
Well my each of my pics are not over 300kb and they're are just screenshots. It is powered on wordpress with gallery plugin. Do you still think I could just run it on a cheap vps such as 512ram?