We own our own hardware and are hosted at the data center that is owned by
@Stealth, who also has basically helped fund the network since it's inception.
Even prior to the move to the new data center I have contacts with most major data centers that we have gotten fairly good deals on high end hardware (even though that is still a large amount of money to host our actual setup).
Currently funding primarily goes to paying staff, taxes, paying for licenses and subscriptions for development/management, and more recently commissioning art from community artists for the news backgrounds and other assets we plan on using.