Oracle Cloud offers a free-forever hosting and I've been running a lightning node on it for about 9 months now at no hosting cost.

According to memspool.space there where about 19 lightning nodes on OCI when I started and at this time there are still only about 19 nodes. People must be asleep in their lazy boy chair.

Given this, what needs to happen is getting the word out about how to support nostr by running your own relay. Then semi technical people can go spin up a relay on OCI at zero cost.