Are you not able to host your service on a server?
You could use some cheap cloud servers from DigitalOcean or Hetzner and it would cost you something like $5 to $10 (depending on the resources you need).
You might spend a bit of time initially just to set up everything but technically it woulf be easy to set up.
For password protection, you can probably do some basic http auth.
I've just read about Yep this morning, a search engine by Ahrefs - one of the most used SEO tools.
I honestly am not sure how well their content and index is going to be, but it seems like they reinvested a lot into it... It could be biased for sure...
I still have my core2duo system, since approximately 2008 - it still runs great and works perfectly. I am mainly running Linux on it as a "build" server for a project.
I also have a J1900 for the past 10 years or so, running a couple VMs on it - not too performant to run major stuff, but works great. I've used this system as my main machine until 2020 (early covid) and upgraded to something way stronger.
I agree with the ownership part. As part of my team (devops), we try our best to help with alerts and incidents, however, without ownership we are limited.
We do not know a product or a component better than those who own it or code it.
I cannot seem to reach the link in the OP, however, I would say that infinite scrolling needs to have a solid UI/UX around.
One of the main reason for inifinite scrolling is to have more and more content shown and try to attract the users and let them stay around (social networks for example).
However, there are cases where it's not implemented correctly and clicking next becomes very awful...
This sounds very cool - I have three iPads with one not being used, would be very interested in doing something like this!
Not exactly related to Apple or iPads but this reminds me of running a webserver on an old Android phone of mine. Created a port forward on my modem and used Cloudflare to set a DNS, it wasn't the fastest thing but pretty cool weekend project.