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If you are building your first website, or perhaps keen to test out various ideas before publishing permanently then free web hosting may prove to be a good option. Those that wish to publish a non-commercial website, such as community groups or college students, may also find a free hosting account adequate for their needs if they don’t mind the possible advertising and lower uptime for their projects. Having said that, there are many free hosting services that actually compete very well with their paid-for equivalents in terms of uptime and some are available ad-free.
The level of service you require will be dependent on the type of project or site you intend to use the service for. As free hosting services normally carry advertising from the provider, it may not be suitable for commercial sites where a conflict of interest could arise. The impression given to your site visitors if it is obvious that you are using a free service is also an important consideration. The main way of concealing the fact that you are using free hosting is to be sure that you can use your own domain name rather than a sub-domain of the service provider.

Also worthy of your consideration is the amount of storage space (often just enough for a more basic website of a few pages) and bandwidth the plan allows. Free sites are hosted on heavily shared servers so your site will compete for resources with many others, resulting in slower loading speeds and more downtime. This often renders a free hosting service as unsuitable for multimedia and it would be very rare to find one capable of supporting any database generated content.

If you looking to have complete control over your website and the ability to enter such items as  meta tags for SEO, for instance, you will want to ensure that you have FTP access to your website.
Many free hosts only allow site editing online, drastically limiting your ability to create the website you want.

Another consideration may be email provision. Some offer a POP inbox but fewer also offer SMTP for your outgoing email. Be sure you can send from other addresses using your existing service if you want to communicate using your hosted domain name.

Despite these and other drawbacks, free web hosting does still offer many benefits to some users.
If you are looking to improve your website building skills or perhaps simply require a website for a specific time frame, then free hosting could well provide you with all you need.

With nothing at risk except your time, it is worth seeking out a number of providers and select the service best suited to your requirements.