I think that's pretty much the idea of calling in a shared hosting provider. Some people have the in-house expertise and need the flexibility of DIY. Most do not. If you are in the second category but want to play with HA anyway, save your company the money and build one at home for fun.

Nothing against the Chinese, but the constant barrage of bots flinging themselves against my firewall needs to stop! In our case, it's more likely script kiddies on a rr.com connection, but nevertheless, better use packet inspection at the Tier-1 level would help here too.

I don't understand why the studios want to cram low-quality, DRM crap down their customers' throats when it is trivial to rip a DVD anyway. If I really wanted to send pirate copies of Legally Blonde 3 to 10,000 of my friends, I'm sure as heck not going to waste 2 hrs downloading and capturing a compressed-as-hell video stream. The nearest video store is 5 mins away, and dvd::rip works just fine, thanks.

That's what slashdot is for.