Hosting is cheap and there is free hosting available if you don’t care about having a custom domain and have a limited audience. If your audience is big enough to go past that bandwidth you can probably monetize somehow and cover server costs easily, even if it’s just selling a few pieces of merch. My website is $80 a year with a custom domain and I get unlimited transfer/bandwidth. It’s shared hosting so over about 1k visitors per day means it’ll get slow but if you’re getting that kind of traffic you can probably sell more merch and get a vps
Use twitter/pixiv/ig for promotion but if you don’t do the above your locking out anyone who refuses to make account. All of them won’t let you look at more than 1-5 images before locking you out entirely with account nag screens that can’t be bypassed. Or just stay on those platforms, I don’t care, I’ll just never read your comic
that’s why the internet fucking sucks now. Everyone’s too afraid to make their own site and lazily relies on the conglomerates of social media, which has reduced the internet into like 5 websites that repost each others content
Also seeing isn’t converted to income, especially on instagram. The more hardcore comic fans may want to see your work in full, may want to follow the story if there’s a narrative to your comic, see your arts evolution, etc. and they’re probably the ones that are far more likely to drop cash on merch for a series they enjoy. That’s why you combine the approaches, post comics on instagram or whatever to get the word out, and have a site so your hardcore fans can easily browse your work (with the added bonus of letting people who don’t fuck with social media also see it)
Again, or don’t, I don’t care. Post everything to facebook and twitter, make the internet just 2 websites instead of 5, refuse to have control of the primary platform your work is shared on, whatever