For a fairly niche resource such as this (it'll never reach a "how do I get a boyfriend" level of audience), it's unlikely to ever draw as much ad revenue to pay for itself. To do so, a high quality, specialized ad system would need to be deployed, which honestly becomes a high touch deployment and maintenance project, that isn't directly tied to the core goal of just providing an awesome resource publicly for the greater good, which is just distracting (or costly) for whoever is behind it.
I appreciate the mature choice to not try to gain small change and instead eat the cost for hosting and development to feel good that you are providing something not just great, but unadulterated as well.
That's passive income which you don't have to bother about, like you'd have to bother about ad deployment. We as an industry are funny, we expect everything to be free of cost _and_ the author should not monetize it in any way possible, it isn't evil to monetize that's what I am saying.
But I really do not understand why we hate ads. I have seen many tutorials which are given out for free. Of course, I am grateful that you decided to offer the course for free of charge, but I really would not mind a little adverts just to get you as the creator/maintainer some $$.
I am a self published author of a decent intro to web development book in Go language, it is an example driven tutorial/ebook and while the main book is open source on Github, there is a leanpub.com version which I offer for variable pricing, 0$ to 20$, and it has been working great for me, rather than getting nothing for the tutorial, I am getting something.
Without ruining the current tutorial, there are ways of getting something from it, of course.