I'm not sold on log shipping, mainly because I've seen too many errors with MS tools like this. I prefer to do it myself.
Total DB size (3 dbs) was about 1GB, though this was initially implemented because we had the servers in another location and ftp'd the data back every 15 minutes. A larger db wouldn't have changed this, though the fulls would probably have been weekly and differentials daily.
Good ideas below and I'd like to implement them, but I don't have a spare server. In this case, we pressed the QA server into production. However, I do practice the restore every Monday to reset the QA environment, so I've got good documentation on that. Only thing we missed, explaining the repointing of the web servers to a new database. Since this was a temp fix, we did not want to rename the server.
Steve Jones