When you are ready with your website and are looking for web hosts, the general tendency at first is to look at the cheaper options and therefore, try to save some money. If you have only a small business or even a website for personal things and you are more or less satisfied with the low bandwidth and storage space that you will be given then it is alright to go for the free web hosting offers and believe me, there are plenty of such servers that are out there. But if you have the means to afford a few dollars or pounds every month, then I would suggest that you go for the paid web hosts because they offer a far better deal than any free web host will ever offer and moreover, they will be reliable as well.

But if you really cannot afford a paid host, I would recommend that you start a blog either at wordpress.com or if you want, at blogger.com, which is relatively good as well. These platforms are very stable apart from being user friendly. Moreover, if you want to make some money off of these, you can put up ad-sense accounts on the website. If, on the other hand, you are making a website for commercial purposes only, then blogger.com is the better option in my opinion.
However, there are a few disadvantages of most free web hosts and the following will show them clearly:

- The free web hosts will include their name in the URL of your website thus leading to very long URLs and this might instill a negative impact in the minds of the prospective buyers that you are looking to impress.

- There are plenty of links on the websites that have free hosts and when the clients click on the links, this third party makes the money, not you or your website.

- The storage space as well as the bandwidth that you will be given is quite small indeed and may not suit your needs properly.

- If you plan to run a business, the free host websites will relatively reduce the opportunity by quite a bit and you will not be able to make the desired impact or profit, for that matter.

- You will not be able to obtain SSL certificates or even carry out transactions properly and in a secure manner, even if you are allowed to do so.

- The technology that these sites used are outdated and in the absence of technology that is state of the art, they are not able to bear when the load increases.

- You will not be given the essential tools to create or customize a proper website and these include the galleries, templates or even the online site builder which is the most essential part by most free web hosts and this is one very major problem.

So, judging by these disadvantages, I am sure you will not consider going for a free web host.