I built the #subjam infra from the ground up on hardware I own, colocated at a secure datacenter I have physical access to.
These servers run a fleet of VMs (libvirt/qemu/kvm) that make up pretty much every service necessary for an Internet platform: DNS (bind), mail (postfix), web (apache), reverse proxy (haproxy), database (postgres, mariadb), storage (gluster) and a bunch of others.
It's very rewarding to be in near complete control of my services!