A number of web hosts provide free web hosting. Some web hosts do this as an incentive for new customers; so they provide their potential customers with an opportunity to try their services. In such a case the web hosting is free only for an initial short period of time after which the web hosting service becomes chargeable. However, there are other web hosts who run free web hosting services as a business i.e. it’s not like a promotional offer. You can register for their free web hosting services for whatever length of time you need it.  

But nothing comes for free. These web hosts provide you with very limited features. So your free web hosting might not support PHP and MySql etc, hence limiting the scripting and database options for you. You might have to look for alternate technologies which might not suit your purpose. The server space on free web hosting will be very limited and hence prevent you from using graphics or heavy controls on your website. Again, this might seriously limit the design of your website and in fact make the free web hosting service unsuitable for you. Similarly, the bandwidth will be limited too. You might have a number of websites hosted on the same server and hence your web site may be slow to load. Then again, there might be no support for FTP thus making the file transfer to your web server space a very time consuming job. So if you plan to update your website quite often and if the website files are not really small in size, you might find it difficult to manage without FTP support.  Further, your control panel would have very limited capability and again make it difficult to conduct maintenance activities on your website. Also, the technical support provided by a free web hosting service is very minimal (and sometimes non-existent). The most annoying thing about free web hosting is that the web host will generally have the right to flood your website with all sorts of ads. So you might have pop-up ads, banner ads or simple text ads being presented to the visitors to your website.  

So, free web hosting does not fit the suit for serious business oriented web sites .If you were looking for just a personal web page or something that is not business oriented (and you don’t mind the limited features of a free web hosting), you might go for a free web hosting service.