If you use the wonders of distributed computing you could simply buy 10 or more shared hosting packages from various providers such as 1&1, go daddy, dreamhost, etc. and easily cover all the bandwidth costs.
They just need distributed software. Seriously all the bandwidth issues are from static images and flash files. The board software doesn't even need to be distributed just the images.
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Anonymous2006-12-02 17:09
If I did it, I'd write a new one of course, I wouldn't bother with distributing the comments (I don't have evidence to suggest it is a lot of HTML bandwidth). I would make an upload & send & delete interface for all the image hosts.
When somebody uploaded a file I'd schedule uploads to all the other servers. When I generated a page on the image board I'd randomly choose a server to serve the file from each time (or even rely on javascript for this). Alternatively the load could also be shared via round robin DNS, but browsers like firefox etc can be pretty stupid about DNS resolution and caching.
The comments are so painfully dull I wouldn't even bother worrying about it. You can use whatever jerk off design you want to. Flat file is only so fast and has lame locking, anything connection based has connection handle issues as well communication issues.
Oh and when a thread or image was deleted the server just sends a message to the imageservers to delete that file.
A more interesting system would be a distributed comment system. Where even the comment pages where distributed across boards across machines. But I think that text boards and comments and replies are not what is dragging 4chan down. I don't have the stats etc but I am just assuming that.