Yeah, I can throw up a Self-hosted site easy. Limitations on bandwidth is the issue.
I get 2TB for $10 a month. With 100k per text comment, that's 20 million comments a month. Hosting low quality images means 2 million a month. High quality images would be a few hundred thousand per month. Video? Forget about it. So it really boils down to what content you are serving up. FR is easy, no images, no video, no problem.
One client had me host a MySQL DB for a game, as well as the game website for a mobile game. Thousands per month.
I have large databases on my $10 / month server. The storage is plentiful. The game depends on what you are serving. If the game has an app to do the rendering, then ten buks a month is adequate. If you are rendering and sending video then obviously not.
One more thing, the bandwidth needed for FR is trivial. Unfortunatelty the bandwidth use up by FR's attackers is very much nontrivial. DDOS from a botnet would detinitely swamp any virtual network on a virtual server. So we must use bare metal and our own 100 GB ethernet. Even then a concerted DDOS from a large botnet would swamp any providers network. So we have to keep that in mind when choosing a provider.
If conservatives establish their own alternate services for these lefty-run companies that are kicking us off, one thing to keep in mind is the liberals may move down a level to pressuring hosting or platform providers (AWS, etc.), what to do about that?