I'm in the process of working on one of my projects, and the requirement came up to download a fairly large file (4GB). Since I only receive ~20GB/month at my house, I decided to just use my server in the U.S. The next requirement came about needing to compile Mapnik, which I had intended to do on the server at some point anyways, yet I ran into memory constraints.
Good old distcc comes to the rescue. I don't need to use distcc that often, yet when I do, it is very handy. However, I always forget to set g++ to use distcc as well. So, for when I forget next time...
DISTCC_HOSTS='home' ./configure make CC=distcc CXX=distcc
Maybe one of these days I'll write a more in depth tutorial for installing distcc, yet until then, you can peruse the notes I left on my VPS provider's wiki.