Hey @F-3000, I think it goes without saying that a lot of people are perplexed.
First, you're trying to compare apples to oranges, here. Webhotel is web hosting - and you're paying more than you should be ($75 a year?! for a single website?!). You could easily get very affordable, 99.9% up-time webhosting for ~$28 a year, and have resources available to host a small to medium size traffic'd website.
That said, web hosting is shared hosting - you share an IP. You share a single (or sometimes several IPs) between 10-50 different customers (if it's done right). If it's done wrong, you're sharing an IP between hundreds of other customers, which means one thing - stability goes down into the shithole.
FL is hosted on a Centos7.6 server, Cloud virtualization built on OpenStack. This means that resources, especially disk access, is guaranteed over something like Shared Hosting or VPS hosting. In the end, it's blazingly fast with SSD drives, (150GB in this case, but FL take sup around 20GB, so we have room), 6GB of RAM, premium 12TB of bandwidth, and a Skylake Intel Core Processor with 6 cores dedicated to resources we'll be using specifically. We're not sharing a damn thing.
What a lot of people don't realize is that FL has, in the past, been hosted over seas at companies which boast MUD hosting for ~$20 to $30 a month. That equates to around $120 cheaper than what we normally paid in the past. However, the big seller here is DDoS protection. We have LVL 7 filtering that will prevent DDoSing (especially against our IPspace) from causing outages. Sure, things may slow down a little bit, but all traffic is filtered by Voxility, (which is expensive in its own) and then routed back to the server IF we're DDoS'd - does anyone remember several years ago when some script kiddie asshole DDoS'd the hell out of us and we had to whitelist people to play? That won't be necessary, ever.
That - and I have full control of the server. I don't answer to anyone. Our resources, as explained, are not shared. Consider this a Desktop that's virtualized, sitting in a Datacenter manned 24/7 by technicians day and night - hardware isn't an issue, and software definitely isn't and never will be. Downtime is essentially non-existent save for a natural disaster - but even then, our data being in the Cloud can easily be transferred to another stack a thousand miles away in minutes, and back online on the same IP space.
Long story short - let's not compare Web hosting with our server.
For what it's worth - the forum host, theforsakenlands.com, is hosted on my Personal VPS that costs nothing to me, and is provided to me from work at no extra charge - so we're not paying for webhosting at all. Perks of working in the field, I guess :)