In the article he mentioned this; he was worried about the hosting costs. Thankfully his host got a laugh out of it and donated the hosting cost and he has in turn donated any proceeds.

Right, but if you're incurring significant hosting costs for a static site in 2021 then you're doing something wrong.

In hindsight, you're right. And obviously I didn't. However at the time, it was the uncertainty as a result of never having done something like this that made me worried.

unless you have images?

Cloudflare Pages[0] claims to have unlimited bandwidth, even for their free tier.

0. https://pages.cloudflare.com/#plans

Hosting costs money. Although for someone who's go-to stack for a meme website is NextJS + React could probably afford to fork over $70 for 15 minutes of Internet fame.

Hosting costs pennies (if even that) if you’re just serving static html content.

If you can build a PaaS around it like Giphy and sell user data, sure.

Yeah but Giphy's a full on product, not just a static single page site.