Some witnesses are either scamming voters by overstating the cost of the servers they run (making a lot of profit) or they are misguided conspiracy theorists who think that the lizard man got stoned on chemtrails and ate the white queen.
Shame on anyone fooled by this. Witness costs are pretty well know. $50-200/m per server depending on size and location. A witness is expected to be running one minimum. As you get higher you are expected to have at least one backup and a seed node. That’s 2-3 servers. Top 20 usually have 2-5 and 1 seed node. Auxiliary servers are generally just small VPS to handle things like kill switch and monitoring.
Many witnesses are run by a handful of third party people and some even sharing the same hardware (yes this is possible).