Not impossible at all. DNS round-robin setup. www.fatechan.net would point to the vps, and img.fatechan.net would point to a list of image hosts. All I have todo is write a wrapper script for karena that is called when images are uploaded to push the image to the hosts.

Hell, I don't even have to do the DNS magic. I can just have the wrapper script do that as well. EX. Kareha wants to link to an image. It thinks the images are in /src/wrapper.php/imagename.whatever. What really happens is with that url, the image name is passed to the wrapper script, the script goes "hay, let me go through my list of hosts, and randomly pick one, and pass that onto the person requesting it."

The hard part for me is not the loadbalancing for the image displaying, it's figuring out how to reliably process and push uploaded images to the hosts, and keep them in sync in realtime. I've already got a basic framework going, I just need to do a little more testing and some security setup and then burn it in.

I plan on GPL'ing my abstraction hacks/scripts, to make it easy for other image boards to deal with scaling/bandwidth issues.

As for dreamhost, I'm not worried about their level of service, I'm terrified I'll give them money, then they'll finally collapse from such drastic overselling. And from what I've experienced, dreamhosts are very serious cpu nazis, and if kareha is giving me fits on a far less stressed host, I can't imagine what dreamhost is going to do to me.

Any other recommendations? I was looking at LunarPages or Servint right now.