Is free Web hosting a good idea?

I first ran my website with free hosting, then I started paying by the month (when it started to grow and get big), then I paid three years up front (no size restriction), I found my supplier acts fairly quickly to fix the problems and appreciates the pats on the back I pass on, I find mine very easy to work with, are there any problems of course! that is the nature of the net (it was designed by man after all, and man is anything but perfect), but overall I would recommend them to anyone, oh and they are cheap to boot, not as cheap as some, but no-where near as expensive than most. Oh mine is Hosting24

Lots of problems with free hosting.

Servers are oversold. Limited CPU Limited space Slow network File size limit.

You get what you pay for! I wouldn't use 000webhost for example because anonymous ftp and CGI is a must for my particular needs. The history of free hosts is a checkered one. Most either go out of business or abandon the free service at some point. And, of course, as they don't take your money they are not obliged to provide you with any support, assistance or guarantees. Anything you put on their servers you do so entirely at your own risk.

If all you need is a site on which to test your HTML skills, advertise a one-off event, or simply be a plaything then free hosting is a great option to have. If you have any kind of serious project in mind, however, open your wallet (it needn't be massively expensive). There's no doubt that you will be glad you did at some point in the future!

free hosting is great used fairly problem is many who use free hosting try and go hog wild try to run a lot of hacked junk and smap on free services not only slows it down for small sites which it was meant for to give people a low cost way in to having a website not to run spam site or huge million hits a min porn sites or gateways and pirated programming sites and such ..

for the most part it not so much you get what you pay for most free host also offer paid services they all run on different machines many offer free hosting on there older equpiment after its been replaced its a bit yesterday slower but still useful..

the server are still usfull but not what most are looking for today , these hosts are happy to use these for free hosting it gives them tons of new proective new pay clients it can be a win win situation :)

The free hosting is ok if you don't get a lot of hits. Also, don't expect great support with it. If you don't need good support and aren't super busy at your site, it might be ok!

Is free candy a bad thing? From a stranger maybe not the best idea.

my point is it depends on the source.

I agree with everyone, free hosting isn't the best idea if you plan your site to blow up like this or even Google. It's fine if you have it for show or if it's like a personal jump drive for you. I had that once, it sucked until I moved my sites to AT&T's web hosting servers and/or Hostgator's servers for the sites I maintain.

free hosting is not a good idea, because it's not reliable solution, you will have a chance that your site will not work.

Good title… This is depend on your requirements. There are good free hosting providers too. But if you really need to have a professional website with advanced features you should go with a good service provider. I saw a good article about this at VPSWEBSERVER site (Moving from Free Web Hosting)

Also note, no one need to give you anything for free if they do not get anything back (ROI). Some free hosting put ads on our website, some has limited features, etc.

Again, it is depend on your requirement.

You have to be very careful about what free web hosts because they usually have one or more of the following problems:

• Are unreasonably restrictive (eg. allow no server-side programming at all, unreasonably small web space limit, unreasonable small file size limit, etc.)
  
• Have unreliable uptimes
  
• Have an unreasonable amount of ads (eg. Tripod and Angelfire by lycos)
  
• Have no real web hosting features (all they could allow you to do is use a crappy site builter without FTP access or anything)
  
• Have undocumented rules you somehow must follow (like 000webhost undocumented rule on MySQL tables)
  
• Are unreliable on how long they will actually last

Even with the best free web hosts the last one "Are unreliable on how long they will actually last" seems to be the problem that always happens with them. One day they're there and the next they just disappear off the Internet.

Also I'd never recommend 000webhost, especially if you want to use PHP and SQL. I had hosted a Facebook application using PHP and MySQL on there and they pointlessly suspended my account for "too much MySQL tables" and after I emailed their support they claimed I violated their TOS despite it not even being mentioned in it.