Excitement and hullabaloo of the next release rightfully will cause server overloads if files are hosted on your server. For such a large following, get us involved. Torrent with limits on bandwidth and let us share in spreading the wildfire. You see what I did thar in the title?
Lost in bowel board movement. This could alleviate much stress on the servers. It's a way we can all share in the bandwidth usage. Providing a small .torrent file instead of the entire server would allow for people to spam f5 all they wanted.
They already use amazon's CDN to distribute the Minecraft files, you can't get much more robust than that.