Need hosting recommendations for very high traffic site

[James Trotta]

I currently use asmallorange but now they say none of their shared or dedicated hosting plans are big enough for me: It's eating a lot of bandwidth, but the concern we have is more the CPU time and memory usage. That affects others on the same server, so upgrading doesn't make it go away for them. And a VPS wouldn't be a viable option because we're talking about an extremely large amount of traffic to deal with.

Basically a few days ago I started getting 10-15 requests/second for favicon.ico on my Movable Type blog thanks to Yahoo. Asmallorange shut me down.

I enabled hotlink protection and got the sites back up. They still couldn't handle all the requests. The host says: "While the hotlink protection does stop some of the bandwidth usage, there is still some used when a request is made to the server for the various response headers sent back to the requesting client. Because of the sheer number of requests coming in, it builds up rather quick."

So who can handle a site that gets lots of requests?