What is the point in hosting server and investing your time (a lot of it) in it?

I must admit, I used to work for a major ISP and had sever colocated boxes on their network. A lot of server admins for various games, when they try getting donations, really play up the "omg I pour so much time into this and don't get paid at all" thing because it works-- it scares fools into thinking their favorite server might go away so they bust out the credit card.

At one point, I was running over 30 dedicated tfc, cstrike, bf1942, and DC mod servers. You know how much time I had invested in it? About an hour a day for the lot of them, and that's counting dealing with abuse reports, patches, updates, network/server problems, etc (do keep in mind this was before things got easy with tech like virtualization). Meanwhile, I saw other community admins with less than 10 servers claim it consumed all of their free time and felt like a full-time job when they were begging for money. It's all a bag of lies, my friend.

If they need help covering server expenses, they need to post a public-facing spreadsheet of the expenses and how donations are being spent. Otherwise, legally, they are selling you a product (a "gift" for a "dontation" is tax evasion).