just colocated my server at the swedish isp james bond alike datacenter called Bahnof (they use submarine engine as backup for powersupply lol) http://www.bahnhof.se/pionen/gallery/
dual 5630, 64gb ddr3, 12x300gb 15k rpm hd, iodrive SLC 80gb ssd for os storage
Incredibly spoiled, roomate is a linux clustering expert.
Transparently scaled Mysql DB; lock-based and load balanced. Been doing pretty much whatever crazy thing I can come up with and the infrastructure has always been overkill.
It would be nifty to have a wordpress.com hosting situation with Xenforo where the smaller sites can just plop on an already provided service by XF. Easier to enter the field for the guys starting out.
joe's datacenters. I just got the server a few days ago. It's an unmanged service but they were quick to respond when I screwed up while configuring the server and needed an OS reload. You'll find quite a lot of good reviews. It's for people that are on a very tight budget but need dedicated servers.