Got some extra bandwidth and a bit of hard disk space?
Then perhaps you might be willing to contribute to FreeCache. This is kind of like an "Akamai" for the rest of us... and perhaps a little of what I've been talking about doing for a while among friends to distribute the load of large, fairly-static content from things like digital camera pics.
In theory, this does all of the things a solution I was talking about would do - reduces the burden on the source host quite a bit, provides replication outside of the burdened host in response to upswings in demand, and doesn't require too much centralized infrastructure. And users are none-the-wiser. I'm going to set up a proxy and see how it goes.
Too bad the file minimum limit is 5megs. This makes sense. Now, someone's just gotta' make a front-end Apache module which will redirect direct requests for too-large content away to freecache, except requests coming from freecache proxies. This should be pretty easy... anyone?