Hosting Recommendation For A Complicated Client

I'm trying to make the best recommendation for a client who has some complicated needs.

They are a university that has opened a public policy and educational office in the national capital.

I do not forsee a substantial amount of traffic being generated on the site - something a simple hosting package from ICDSoft should be able to handle.

However, there are three issues that complicate matters:

1) They may actually have huge spikes in traffic. They anticipate occasional mention in the national TV/radio media and in these cases, they don't want their site to buckle.

2) They do some audio and four video podcasts a month. They have around 50 viewers of each right now (not too substantial) but if they become successful, that number could increase by a lot.

My initial thinking was to try to host these on an outside service - even a free one - like OurMedia.

3) They want to send out email newsletters. Right now they have 850 subscribers for the list for the new location, but as people visit the site, they will sign up more.

I presume they will want to have the email's originate from the same location that the @[url] is to prevent being marked as spam, right? So, if they were to use constantcontact, emails would be from @constantcontact. But if they wanted it to be from their @[url].edu, we would need to send them from the .edu's own SMTP server, right?

I have thought about the 'cloud computing' thing - does that scale up automatically or not?

I also want to know from ICDSoft how much concurrent bandwidth/connections I can get simultaneously (is that the right way to word the question to them?)