We have decided to put our servers in data centers on east and west coast of US, to keep high level redundancy. After evaluating number of replication options, apart from VPN there is no other way to do replication for SQL Server. We are investigating VPN but I have following questions.

Our Large DB consists of media information (pictures/movies/audio/pdf) etc, so we are not very concerned about security because they are not financial sensitive data.

1. SQL 2005 supports or can be configured to support replication over internet? If Yes then should we downgrade to 2005?

2. If SQL 2008 Publisher is configured for Web Sync, can we write an automatic program (C# Windows Service) to act as pull subscriber and run on the subscriber server and replicate subscriber database?

Or are there any API available in SQL where we can write our own program to do replication in very generic way? (In a nut shell, can we write our own C# Windows Service based Subscriber program?)