With the increase in file size, bandwidth performance requirements and global sites, new distributed online solutions are required up to ease our hosting pains.

Because web content is getting more and more rich each day, the size of files and the need for larger storage has never grown so quickly.  To add to this, content must be sent across the globe and needs to be lightening fast in order to satisfy clients demands.

One solution to this problem is to offload your large content or streaming files to distributed online storage partners in the cloud.  There hosting fees are normally much cheaper when you consider the cost of drives and bandwidth and they are distributed throughout the globe in order to accommodate end users in all reaches of the internet. 

A few players in this market include Amazon's S3, Akamai, Niranix, FleiScale and Microsoft's SSDS (SQL Server Data Services)...

These all have their pros and cons and are better suited for specific situations but all can greatly help your site if you are willing to build in the architecture to distribute your application.  All of these in general can help with performance, global balancing, redundancy and usually a cost savings.

Next time you have a need to host large files or have a global site with lots of resource files, I recommend you look into these solutions.  In my opinion, all resource files for all sites should be deployed to distributed systems but until the management and integration of these all come together it may be to much work for the average developer.