No.  Most hosts are in business to make money and they would lose money hosting your site.  They have to pay from $0.3 to $5 per GB of transfer to upstream providers themselves.  Almost all hosts that have “unlimited” plans specify in their acceptable use policies that no site can use an “excessive” amount of resources.  If you use too much disk space, bandwidth, or CPU time, these “unlimited” hosts will ask you to upgrade or leave.

You can figure out how much data transfer you will require by estimating your average page size (including graphics!) and multiplying it by the number of page views you expect to have in a month.  For example: with an average page size of 50 KB, and around 2000 page views per day, you will transfer an average of 3 GB per month.  In this case, you should get a plan with 4 to 5 GB of data transfer limit per month, so you don’t have to worry about overstepping your account’s limit, which may cause extra per GB transfer charges.

Uptime is the percentage of time that a web site is working.  For example, if some host has an uptime average of 99.86%, this means that your site will be down for a total about 1 hour each month.  We monitor uptime of customer websites of many web hosts and we display this data on the host’s details page.  Some hosts also offer “uptime guarantees” but this is not as valuable as it might appear (see our gotchas page for more details).

The main method of uploading files to your site’s account is by using FTP.  When you sign up with a host, you will probably get an FTP account that lets you access files in your account (usually ftp.yoursitename.com, your main account name and password).  Then you can use a built-in Windows or Internet Explorer FTP client, or some other software that supports FTP such as CuteFTP, WS_FTP, or Total Commander, to transfer files from your hard drive to your account.  If you don’t get an FTP account or if you prefer a Web interface, you can use your account control panel’s File Manager instead.  Yet another method is to use an SSH or telnet client software, such as SecureCRT, to upload using Zmodem protocol (sz and rz commands).
All these methods will work fine, but we recommend using dedicated FTP programs as the preferred solution because these programs have the best user interfaces and support advanced options like setting file permissions and resuming aborted file transfers.

The methods of payment which are accepted depend on each individual host.  Almost everybody accepts Paypal and Bank Transfer.  Vast majority of plans require periodic (usually monthly up to yearly) payments.