There's no doubt you will get better features on hosting companies like SiteGround.com that provide you a lot of bandwidth, space and support, and don't think you'll get unlimited bandwidth or space from a hosting company who says you will, those include something on their TOS that enables them to shut down your website without prior notices and that's what they will do if you waste a lot of bandwidth or space. Web space and bandwidth rely on expensive equipment and there's no doubt you will not get unlimited bandwidth and space for your lifetime.

But in other hand free web hosts are great if you want to make a testdrive on your website and maybe later upgrade your account if you need to. I will talk about some free hosting companies that provide you hosting with NO ADS, PHP scripting language, MySQL and FTP.

FreeHostia is a great free and paid cluster based web hosting provider.

I made my personal web site some years ago, and I wanted to make a website that was totally made out of no money just to see if it was possible. I've tried much free web hosts but then I settled with Freehostia because they're a stable company and probably have the best up-time percentage out there between those other free web hosting companies. They also claim to have one of the fastest servers out there.

The Features

Overview

  Absolutely FREE

  No setup fee

  Data storage: 250 MB

  Monthly bandwidth: 5 GB

Customer Support

  Free 24/7 technical support

  Detailed video tutorials

  Extensive documentation

  Integrated ticketing system

  Response time: 24 hours

Domains and Subdomains

  Hosting for 2 domain

  10 subdomains

Free Features

  Elefante free scripts

  FrontPage Extensions

Site Statistics

  Detailed bandwidth stats

E-mail Features

  3 POP3 accounts

  3 Email aliases

  SpamAssassin protection

  E-mail filters

  Webmail service

  POP3 access/no SMTP

  "Catch-all" e-mails

Scripting and Database

  1 MySQL database

  10 MB MySQL DB space

  Perl enabled

  PHP enabled

  PHPMyAdmin

  Over 3,000 Perl modules

Site Management Tools

  Advanced Control Panel

  Multi-lingual control panel

  1 FTP account

  Web-based file manager

Misc Features

  Instant account activation

  SSL with certificate gen

  SSI (Server Side Includes)

  RAID secured data storage

  Easy upgrade options

  Custom 404 error page

OS and Backup 

  Stable Linux with Apache

  UPS & diesel generator

Minimum Server Configuration

  Dual P4 XEON 2.8/1GB RAM

  2x160GB HDDs in RAID

  100 MBits conn. per server

  320 GBits data center conn.

  99.9% uptime guarantee

My Opinion

This is a free web host I would recommend if you do want to make a test drive of your website. You can buy your .com domain with them for $9.95 and start your online business and then maybe upgrade to some of their better hosting plans like the Xtra one which provides you 30GB of space, 320GB of monthly bandwidth, a free domain name, 70MB of MySQL space, all that and more at about 9.95 monthly payment or 95.40 annually.

AwardSpace is also a fairly good free web hosting provider that also offers you the chance to upgrade if you feel you need to. They are also a stable company and don't seem to be able to shut down in the near future, counting that they're online since 2001. They're features are pretty much like Frehostia's ones and you can see most of them here. I also tried Awardspace but changed to freehostia because I was getting a lot of 500 server response errors back in the days, I hope they got better now.

The most expensive package at AwardSpace.com is "Max Pack Plus", which offers 2 free domains (better than Freehostia that offers only one), 200GB of disk space, 3TB of monthly bandwidth, and unlimited MySQL space (then again I don't think they will let you have your huge forum with 500 000 users... they will shut down your account if it gets bad for other users).

The reason I still stick with Freehostia is point e.viii of their free hosting terms of service: "AWARDSPACE at its Beta version will not implement any kind of advertisement on the user's pages. However in the long term AWARDSPACE reserves the right to place advertisement on user's pages on its sole discretion without notice."

00WebHost is a free hosting company that is fairly new, and seems to exist since 2007. They seem to have some good features but I wouldn't trust them now over FreeHostia. We don't know it they will still be on business tomorrow (much free hosting providers close suddenly a few months after opening) so it's better to stick with the free hosts that we know they're consistent and stable.

Their features are also similar to the FreeHostia's ones but better. They have the very latest cPanel, 100GB of monthly bandwidth (vs. 5GB from FreeHostia) and a website builder for inexperienced users. I definetly sugest you check out this one.

Update: I finally tested 00webhost.com. I made a wordpress installation and it was a lot slower than a wordpress installation on Freehostia.com or an account at Wordpress.com (actually the only reason I rather do my own installation of wordpress in Freehostia than to use a Wordpress.com account is that with my own wordpress installation I can use the plugins and themes I want). Besides slower, on the 3rd day I was annoyed by an "Error establishing a database connection". That never happened to me at Freehostia.com.

You may find other free hosts with similar or better features, but I don't know if you should trust free hosting companies that are on business for less than a year. They usually fail and close suddenly or else they don't usually have a good up-time and/or have some errors. I've tried much more hosts but I ended up on FreeHostia, and I'm happy there. They seem to be consistent.

If you have better alternatives than the 3 ones I talked about here, please tell me about them in a comment.