If the resources are kept in check and the infrastructure is maintained in a sane manner, there's no reason why the service can't work well on donations alone.

If the resources are kept in check and the infrastructure is maintained in a sane manner, there's no reason why the service can't work well on donations alone. It's no Wikipedia after all, and certainly serving static pages would require far less overhead than server-side scripting (of course, this excludes logins/sessions, but considering how simple the backend is and sessions are limited there, it shouldn't require too much overhead either). And I don't think the creator feels this is a "business" in any way. It's more like an ambitious hobby/public service.