This! I very much want to hear about how you get your bandwidth.

We actually just get a datacenter blend, but I _believe_ they've got us cordoned off on our own dedicated 40gbps Level3 (now Centurylink) line to prevent us getting attacked from harming other customers. It's not so much about which provider you go to, it's more just about the economies of scale. Our entire fleet exists in one physical DC location due to the requirements of Minecraft's netcode, so rather than having five 10gbps lines at five facilities, we've got one 40gbps line. Because of that the ISPs don't meter by the GB, but by the 95th percentile traffic. At those scales, we're paying pennies on the dollar compared to public "by-the-GB" pricing.

What do you do about backups? I saw you only have one DC, are you worried about that DC being flooded etc and losing all your data?

Offsite AWS Glacier backups, as well as a warm redundancy in another DC.