Better ideas than this:

* Offered paid, private registry that doesn't cost an insane amount of money. Somehow host it on the same metal as the public repo.

* Decentralize. Make it easier to setup mirrors or proxy/cache layers. If I had a simple to deploy npm caching proxy that didn't need to replicate every upstream package, only the ones that I use, it would reduce load upstream and protect me when upstream fails. ++ if I can host private packages there as well.