Free Hosting Providers come in may shapes and sizes. Some hosting providers will place advertisements on your page in exchange for letting you use space on their servers. The site owner is basically being used by the hosting provider as a way to force viewers to see the advertisements that provide the host's income. Not that there is a problem with that exchange, but for the purposes of generating your own revenue, you don't want other advertisements competing with your own!

I would personally recommend, for your own advertising revenue's sake, staying away from free hosts that include their own ads on your pages. This, unfortunately, limits the choice of a good free hosting provider. After all, these free hosts have to generate their revenue somehow, and hosting their own ads is probably the easiest way to do so.

Other free providers may use other methods besides hosting advertisements to make money. The free host 110mb.com, where this site is currently located, seems to use a variety of non-intrusive methods to earn revenue. One is using the free service as an advertisement of their non-free hosting services. They seem to be very reliable and pages load up very quickly, so in the future when I move to a non-free host, I will look into their non-free services.

Files are limited to less than 5 MB in size on their free hosting package, as to provide an incentive to upgrade to get rid of file size limits. They also provide some extras that you can use if you pay a small fee. For instance, to use MySQL on your free site, you need to pay a small one-time fee to turn it on forever.

So, I personally recommend 110mb.com (and, no, I'm not on their payroll in any way). Make sure you look around a bit and see which hosting provider is right for you.

Bill