What backbones? We had an option to get much cheaper pricing on Cogent. We decided to pay a bit extra for premium.
Also, most of our cost was for the hardware(not the bandwidth). We went with top-notch storage with RAID and a bunch of ram. In hindsight, we should have bought the hardware for one-time fee but didn't for cash flow reasons.
FWIW, 100TB (approx 300Mbps continuous) costs us approximately $450/mo with a good quality host (Quadranet) with a good blend of upstreams. A cheaper host (Ubiquity) charge us about half of that. It's worth paying the extra for sure.
Also, most of our cost was for the hardware(not the bandwidth). We went with top-notch storage with RAID and a bunch of ram. In hindsight, we should have bought the hardware for one-time fee but didn't for cash flow reasons.