The thing is, if your community is small costs are probably in the couple dollars a month range. An order of magnitude lower than the costs of hardware like your computer. If communities are large where an individual cannot trivially bear the costs, donation models have worked where the community itself funds its hosting.
Not nearly everybody on the Internet has ever bought their own computer. There's schools, public libraries etc., to say nothing of the billions of people that have only a smartphone and no desktop or laptop at all.
So what? Takes nothing from the point that hosting is in the dollars a month paid for by a half hour of work in most of the western world. I’m sure developing countries have cheaper hosting costs to match to purchasing power in these locations.
