Many hosts, especially the free hosts, offer “unlimited” bandwidth. With all my respect to these companies and their attempt to look generous beyond belief, I must say this (and anyone who has a basic understand of servers bandwidth will confirm it to you): There is not such a thing as unmeterred bandwidth.

If your hosting service says they will provide you with bottomless resource of data transfer, this means either there is a limitation of any other sort, or simply they assume you won’t be using much, and if you will - your site will go offline under some convenient pretext. The “limitations” I mentioned could be different, depending on the host. The most popular is ‘file size upload limit’, i.e. you cannot upload files larger than 150 or 200 MB. This way you can never really use huge amounts of bandwidth unless your site has massive traffic of visitors that comprehensively browse through your website.

If, however, there are no limitations of any kind, no daily nor monthly bandwidth control, mostlikey the usage is shared, this means if the entire server you are hosted on has a max. of 1000GB data transfer per month, and someone on your server used up 900GB, you and all the other users would have to make do with the remaining 100GB, for the rest of the month, for all of you…

As I said before, normally only free servers  would offer free bandwidth, assuming that mostly newbies webmaster use free hosts and do not have a good idea about it (yet). Most new website developers also do not have a clue how much data transfer would their website need  and after having heard dreadful stories about sites going offline after having exceeded their BW usage, naturally they fall for the “unlimited bandwidth” bait, especially since it’s free.

Just remember… Free cheese is only in a mousetrap ;)