Visual Studio 2010 - web deploy times out - what to do?

My MVC2 web project is deployed using the VS 2010 "web deploy" feature. It used to run fine but now it is timing out more often than not with this error message:

Web deployment task failed.((10/11/2010 1:01:59 a.m.) An error occurred
when the request was processed on the remote computer.)

(10/11/2010 1:01:59 a.m.) An error occurred when the request was processed on the remote 
computer.     The remote host closed the connection. The error code is 0x800704CD.      

Searching for the error code 0x800704CD does not return anything helpful.

Is there a way to increase the timeout period, or should I be looking for an alternative method and forgetting about web deploy?

Forget the error message. That error message is the local one. You are not interested in this - the reason it fails is that the remote host closed the connection. What you want is to see the server side logs for the server side error message. Could be a timeout, but the server side should have more information. Start with the IIS logs and event logs.