I notice that there is a lot of mention about bandwidth for web sites any more. Is Bravenet refering to how many visitors you get or to how much your website takes up plus visitors.

The way I understand it bandwidth refers to how many visitors you get.

If that is the case then some of these people who are just getting their sites up are getting spammed.

Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that passes through your site. If, for example, you have a 3.5 MB mp3 file, and 20 people downloaded it in one day, that is 70 MB of bandwidth those downloads consumed... plus the bandwidth of loading your pages, seeing any graphics, etc.

Tony

Bandwidth is the the total size of all the files both up and down loaded to and from a site in a particular time.

Ways to overuse bandwidth are:
Oversized image files
Pages too long
Background music