The mainstream media, particularly in the UK really picked up on this story at the time and I would say the 'pay for tuition' component played a big part in that.
There's an incomplete list of coverage he received on the site [1] but it doesn't include TV or radio, which was a fair amount too from memory.
What version(s) are you on? I spent a lot of time checking in more recent versions of FF after developing the site.
I do pretty much everything on OS X these days, but I did fire up a couple of VMs with Win XP, Win 7, and Win 8 to test.
I did my entire dev on Chrome, and apart from what appears to be a new canvas issue at present, I'm not having any major issues. (I'm looking into the canvas problem.)
Hosting images and data will be expensive, at the moment difficult to predict all the future costs. Our objective is store it for generation by paying little.
We are starting with monthly and yearly plan but definitely think over one time. Cheers