The other thing I didn't get from the whitepaper is...can these nodes be setup on a basic VPS? Or due to the high storage demands, does this require a specialized server or expensive VPS package?
From the looks of it, yes its completely possible. Don't know if it will earn enough to cover costs of the VPS . Especially since, if its possible to VPS people will jump aboard until the amount of nodes is so high, the payout per node will be greatly reduced.
I am sure there will be things you can do to increase average earnings, assigning more hard drive space to act as a node and such. But that still doesn't help so much, if 5000 nodes are running, you will be getting much more than if 50,000 are running, no matter how large you choose your node, unless you increased your node size by 100 times
But then again each node might be a fixed amount. i don't think there is anything specific to it in the white paper