One thing I've been gently contemplating is something along the lines of the cacheing mirrors set up for the Astronomical Database Service. I admit I set up UKADS at Nottingham, but I was following a known-good recipe from ADS Central in the States somewhere, and it was on a Sun system (which shows how long ago it was). The externally-visible structure of the site was also somewhat simpler than the 'Cat .... which is where the OP came in.

But the basic idea sounds, erm, sound: a mirror site which caches what it's called on to relay. In the ADS's case, they intentionally threw away older and less-requested pages, but if we didn't do that we'd end up over time with a full mirror.

€0.02 from the demented keyboard of:

    MaJoC the Filk