Regarding the Hyundai / Jaguar comparison, Ok, it's not the best example, but which auto would you expect to be able to cruise at 120 mph in the desert with the A/C blasting?
Cheap hosting is available everywhere, but cheap can have issues. Sometimes they buy inexpensive hardware which fails as often as regular PC hardware, sometimes they just don't put it together properly (many times I've seen cables blocking airflow or putting tension on a heat sink, or heat sink compound which is improperly applied to CPUs), and sometimes they just don't treat it right (I/O bound load put on a hard drive attached directly to a sturdy metal case with no shock absorber, for instance). Generally, only the largest (Google, Amazon), premium, and some of the smaller / smallest hosting companies hire people who consider all of these issues.
Then there's server loading. How many other sites are hosted on a single server with a $40 hosting plan? Amiga.org wouldn't necessarily need to get too popular; one of the other sites on the server could gain popularity, or someone could piss off a script kiddie and start a (D)DoS, and poof! amiga.org is crawling or unavailable.
Whoever mentioned free hosting referring to offered hosting is right - sometimes people inside the community have more interest in keeping the site up and running than faceless hosting companies. I thought the reference was to free hosting where ads that the hosting company adds are placed in the site, but that wasn't what you were talking about.
