Personally, I have a VPS where I keep my own mail server, webmail, ownCloud instance (calendar, address book, file storage, etc), IRC bouncer... All courtesy of Sovereign (https://github.com/al3x/sovereign)
Very interesting resource, thanks for posting ; even if not for the playbook itself, the collection of tools is interesting.
Having your own server is definetely a good solution, it just needs experience and comes at a certain price, even if it stays reasonnable. But most people just don't want to be bothered with maintaining the box (hosting payment, security updates, domain name renewal, SSL ceritificate renewal and so on).
However, it is a fantastic way of learning by yourself!
Well, if you use the supported Debian 7 pointing Ansible to your box is all that's needed.
Since I decided to go with Ubuntu 14.04 (unofficially supported), it took a little longer and I had to submit a couple of patches to make it work there. The "hardest" part was figuring out how to set-up the DKIM and SPF records in my registrar's DNS control panel (namecheap).
Other than that, I don't really have to babysit the thing: I get a weekly logrotate report by email and rarely, if ever, SSH into the box to check that everything works. From time to time I re-run the Ansible script to ensure everything is in proper order but, still, I almost never have to spend more than 10 minutes a fortnight.
