The site will very easily pay for itself with donations. It's not that expensive to serve static HTML, especially when you are using Nginx and sendfile.
It's all understandable. But even if it's free and even if my content is stupid, I'd still feel a little uncomfortable because of how much doubt the owner expresses over the viability of the service.
I have a lot of experience scaling web applications, I've been doing this for over 14 years. I should probably highlight that somewhere.
I've already gotten enough donations today to run the server as-is for 8 months! I also found a sweet deal with a reliable dedicated provider via a tip that will cost substantially less than my intial estimates.