I've been in the same situation, and ended up using a combination of 3rd party solutions. Both have free versions of their services that do everything I need and more.
For embedded upload links in your pages and files up to 2GB
http://www.sendthisfile.com/
For FTP access to shared folders
http://www.4shared.com/
Between the two it saves me a lot of headaches and I don't have to worry about dragging down the servers here.