First up, examine what sort of sources are available to you. Local homebrew club, regular retailer, straight from the distributor, brewpub. Our local homebrew club is very closely tied to our one homebrew shop. While I suppose there are some benefits, it means the club doesn't organize any group buys.
Thankfully, we have a couple of other sources. In the past we put together enough interest to fill out an entire pallet, so we ordered directly from a distributor. That was a fantastic deal. We haven't tested it yet, but a local brewer has been working on a microbrewery owner in the area and I think we've got the green light to tack on to his orders. This is a win-win, since if he can't fill out the pallet, he'd have to eat the extra shipping cost (the shipping is charged per pallet, regardless of how full it is).
Last up, I don't think you're too far away from Morebeer's warehouse. They have pretty reasonable bulk grain/full bag prices, and if you don't have to pay shipping you can get a pretty awesome deal.
The next concern is storage. Generally, crushed grain's lifetime is measured in weeks. If you decide to start buying bulk, you'll want to buy the whole grain and crush it yourself. I went in three ways on a mill with the people I do the grain buys with, so we minimized that cost. I've used 6 month old grain without any issues whatsoever, and while it might be pushing things I've seen people post on here about using 2 year old grain.
Like you can see from the rest of the posts, there are a lot of options as far as your container goes. I store the majority of my grains in the orange homer buckets from home depot. A lot of people use vittle vaults because of the airtight seal and how well they stack. Some folks use tupperware or mason jars for storing the smaller quantities of specialty grain. I also have several varieties of base malts that I've kept around in the bags without any problems.
I think that pretty well covers grain. On to the hops. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the puterbaugh farms website at
www.hopsdirect.com. You're buying straight from the farmer, so no distributor or other middle man to jack up the prices. They have ridiculously good prices, they carry a lot of whole leaf varieties that my homebrew shop only stocks as pellets, and they carry some things like amarillo that my homebrew shop doesn't have at all. They also have excellent customer service and are well known for being a couple ounces heavy on their whole-leaf "pounds". Also, during harvest they have a blowout sale on the last year's crop, and you can get even more amazing deals.
Anyway, if you use the search there's a lot of info on here. Edwort does huge bulk grain buys, and I know The_Pol put together a group hop buy awhile back. Just be careful, before you know it you'll have an entire closet full of malt and a chest freezer dedicated to hops