Some stuff to think about if you are planning on a big site with lots of pictures, construction plans, etc.
5 gigs a month is about the best you'll get for free, but you should check if that's really throughput per month, or throughput per hour. Sounds like 1&1 is true throughput per month; most other free sites are throughput per hour.
If you calculate it out to per hour, 5 gigs/month goes to less than 7 megs/hour. Webpages with small images don't even come close to hitting the max, but just ten 200K images is the same as one 2meg file. If you're serving a 2 meg file, three (and a half) people can download it before you're overloaded for that hour. (And the 5 meg Mame binaries are only one per hour.) When overloaded like this, the site is turned off for the rest of the hour.
With true throughput on the per month scale, your site can take grouped hits ("after work" group), as long as there is some "rest" time with few hits ("3-6am sleep" time). However, watch out. Don't get too popular, or else you'll get charged the extra $/gig, and it can go really high if you get /.'ed. Sometimes you can tell them, or you are forced, so once the per month limit is hit, the site is down for the rest of the month; this can save cash in your pocket book.
You might not need to worry about all that, but a heads up. [shrug]