Bandwidth is cheap ($0.15/mbit/sec from many backbones), rackspace and power is cheap. A rack and the bandwidth they need in a real datacenter is less than most people's monthly rent, so your 'someone's closet' assumption is just clueless. They did it right by building their own infra and not vendor lock into a cloud service which would have cost them 10 - 100x more for the same compute and bandwidth. I'm actually impressed they got by with 9 servers. At this rate they could scale to the compute needed today in a single rack costing them no more than the initial purchase of the new servers.
Hide the origin servers from cloudflare with several nginx proxies on throwaway/bulletproof hosting providers, DNS round robin. They can be anywhere with little impact to latency since cloudflare is anycast. Then the only party you have to appease is cloudflare and your server farm is protected.
I watched it, and I don't think I'm sold...
- I don't think they used dominion in these precincts (not to say something is still fishy though)
- The stream of steady values from certain precincts is due to no new votes being reported. Otherwise this would be the real smoking gun, no?
- Given 2, the "switching" seen between precincts as some join or leave a stream of certain ratios could mathmatically have been legitimate given enough precincts.
I think a much better smoking gun is the vote swapping in the edison data, there was a huge thread on this already.
Except when they send all the "honest" counters home and four corrupt counters pull the boxes from under the table.