When providing a download for software archives I always like to provide both a zip and gziped tar file. 7-Zip is a great free tool for archiving, even comes in a portable version. I used to use it to create a compressed zip file and a uncompressed tar file. Then I would upload the tar file and gzip it command line. Kind of a pain, but I didn't see where 7-Zip would do gzip compression.

The WayBack Machine, or Internet Archive, allows you to search archives of stored website snapshots.

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

For example, search for the URL "http://www.cnn.com", and you'll see a list of archives that span back to the year 2000.