This isn't Joe's blog running from a desktop found in a dumpster. It's a university with actual infrastructure. They should be able to handle this. Registration is probably more load.

A 72MB file being served 500,000 times over a 24hr period is 3-4Gb/sec.

The department probably has one or more web servers serving content off a network drive. Your average "rack of network storage" won't even blink at that.

There was probably a gigabit switch somewhere or that was being a bottleneck or the web server was simply misconfigured for this task.

+1, thanks for the correction. Apparently I have a skewed perspective only working on web at big corporate joints.