A 20 KB blog page and a 2 GB video are the same kind of request to a server, just 100,000 times the data. Everything about large-file hosting is making sure the pipe, the disk and the pricing can take that.
"Unmetered" bandwidth, and what it hides
Unmetered means the host does not count your total transfer. It does not mean unlimited speed. The real limit is your port speed: the width of the network connection to your server. A 1 Gbps port can push roughly 300 to 320 TB a month at full tilt. A 100 Mbps port, about a tenth of that.
Some plans are also "unmetered" but carry a fair-use clause that throttles you after a threshold. Read it. For steady large-file traffic you want a stated port speed and a fair-use limit you will not hit, or a plan that sells bandwidth by the terabyte so at least the maths is honest.
Theoretical ceilings. Real throughput is lower and depends on peering and the client's connection.
Egress fees: the bill nobody reads
On many cloud providers, data leaving the server (egress) is charged per gigabyte, often around 1 to 9 cents. That is invisible on a small site and brutal on video. Ten terabytes of downloads at 9 cents is 900 dollars in transfer alone.
Providers that include generous transfer, or that have zero egress fees, change the economics completely for this use case. So do object storage services with free or cheap egress to a paired CDN.
The pattern that really works
- Store the files in object storage, not on the web server's disk. It is cheaper per gigabyte, scales without resizing a server, and is built for this.
- Put a CDN in front. The CDN caches each file at locations near viewers, so the origin serves each file once and viewers get it fast. For video this is the difference between smooth playback and constant buffering.
- Keep the web server small. It just runs the site and hands out signed links to the files. It never streams the bytes itself.
Disk speed matters too. Serving many large files at once is a heavy read workload. NVMe storage sustains far more of those reads per second than older SSDs or network disks, which is why a busy media library on slow storage stutters even when bandwidth is spare.
What to look for
- A stated port speed (1 Gbps is a sensible floor for real file traffic)
- Included transfer measured in terabytes, or clearly zero egress fees
- Object storage from the same provider, with cheap or free CDN egress
- NVMe storage on the server that holds anything hot
- A fair-use policy you have read, not just the word "unmetered"
- Range-request support, so players and download managers can resume
Mahdi Hassan · Web Developer & Site Speed
Never serve video straight off the web host's disk. Put it in object storage with a CDN in front from day one. It is cheaper, it is faster everywhere, and it means a traffic spike on a popular file cannot take the rest of your site down with it.
Illustrative example
A course site with a surprise transfer bill
Picture lesson videos served from the same cloud server as the site. A launch week sends downloads to 8 TB. The plan was cheap; the egress at a few cents a gigabyte was several hundred dollars.
Moving the videos to object storage with a bundled CDN cut the transfer cost to a fraction and made playback smoother for students outside the origin region.