It's a million dollars. Even if it cost a thousand dollars a month to host, you could pay that with ~1% interest on the money.

And realistically it's something that after the initial craze cools, can run on quite cheap hosting.

He promised to keep it up for 5 years. After 5 years, the site had zero traffic, and there was no point of keeping it up. Also, links started going dry at that point with original owners no longer caring.