My friends have offered to pay for some of the hard drives, but I refuse because once I accept money, there's an implicit owing them to keep it up (whether that's real or in my head). Now it's just a best effort, and I prefer that over a couple hundred bucks.
Just getting people to pay their domain fees on time (or at all) was a nightmare back then - so nowadays there's only one deal on infrastructure I own:
It's free and comes with no guarantees. If you need a domain or subdomain, you own it, pay for it, and just put a DNS record to the IP I tell you.