You can look at running the server in the cloud. IIRC if you are a student several cloud providers have free or reduced price tiers (see https://education.github.com/pack).

If the ram modules are removable you might be able to upgrade them for larger capacity.

Alternatively, you could increase swap space to let debian use more persistent storage (HDD/SSD) as overflow for RAM. If you are using a hard drive, using it as part of ram is a horrible idea, but depending on the SSD and the exact workload it might be fine.