Read that again folks:

"a very reasonable but basic check would be to check each domain and verify that it was online and responsive to http requests. With only a million domains, this could be run from my own computer relatively simply and it would give us a very quick temperature check on whether the list truly was representative of the “top sites on the internet”. "

This took him 50 minutes to run. Think about that when you want to host something smaller than a large commercial site. We live in the future now, where bandwidth is relatively high and computers are fast. Point being that you don't need to rent or provision "big infrastructure" unless you're actually quite big.