"Creators" went for direct monetisation because de-monetisation can happen on youtube for almost any arbitrary reason and there is almost no way to contact a human (as far as I am aware) to remedy such a situation.
I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?
Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.
Does peertube do that?
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.