Having recently merged a number of separately configured sites into a single consolidated multisite, I found myself with URLs like:

http://www.site1.com/sites/www.site1.com/files/somefile.png

...on all except the main site of the multisite configuration.

Although img_relocator allows me to just type things like:

<img src="somefile.png" />

... and still have these URLs be automagically generated, they still appear to those users who actually look at the URLs.

Enter mod_rewrite

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

With these sites running over Apache 2.x, mod_rewrite offers a simple way to rewrite the files URLs: in the Apache site definition file for the vhost describing the site, we can use:

At long last, I've moved the OSInet sites from shared hosting to a VDS over the 4-day Xmas period, and overall it went well.

However, with new users (dare I say bots ?) eager to refresh the site after a few hours offline, I soon had to stand about 20 hits/sec, which proved to be a bit too much on this small VDS. So I enlisted the help of APC, just like the drupal.org sysops do, and like I do on the group's intranet servers and it went really faster.