You can get this done if you have a bit of coding knowledge: for hosting files you need preferably a VPS or Dedicated server, you can manage to use unlimited hosting from 1 and 1 or godaddy, you can develop from scratch your own website to suit your purpose or you go for off-the-shelve scripts (ready designed), with extra 10 lines of code you can get users to read and share your content all the same.
If there’s any more details or features you want your project have, y not give the details, may be I can help you put up the website for 15k
A Java applet (which was last updated in 2013) is not the best recommendation in this day and age.
There are a handful of Javascript libraries for reading (and processing) PDFs.
Even browsers have native PDF support.
I don’t have a PDF reader in my system because all my browsers read PDF.