I had a copy of the whole thing under my desk though in Olin Library on a Pentium 3 machine from IBM that was built like a piece of military hardware. In April the sun would shine in the windows of my office, the HVAC system was unable to cool my office, and temperatures would soar above 100F and I'd be sitting there in a tank top and drinking a lot of water and sports drinks and visitors would ask me how I could stand it.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840
I could even make those cards tradeable like NFTs, use DynamoDB as the ledger, and not worry about the cost at all.
On the other hand if you are talking about something bandwidth heavy forget about AWS. Video hosting with Cloudfront doesn't seem that difficult, even developing a YouTube clone where anybody could upload a video and it gets hosted seems like a moderate sized project. But with the bandwidth meter always running that kind of system could put you into the poorhouse pretty quickly if it caught on. Much of why YouTube doesn't have competition is exactly that: Google's costs are very low and they have an established system of monetization.
I am keeping my photo albums on Behance rather than self-hosting because I lost enough money on a big photo site in AWS that it drove my wife furious and it took me a few years to pay off the debt.