Full Domain Hosts at No Cost!
These are a great idea for learning about design, or even for a vanity email (you@whateveryouwant.com) without the monthly fees. You do still have to purchase the domain name, but honestly the prices for .coms etc have fallen so drastically since I began, it's really not a big expense. Godaddy and many others often have specials where you can get a name for around $7 a year! Many of these however will want you to register with them. Since that's their only way of making money, that's more than fair :)
DotEasy.com Free Domain Hosting
Included with domain name purchase, at the time of this review buying the domain name through them costs $25, a reasonably competitive price, especially since they offer you free hosting with that! Their free hosting package gives you 100 megs of storage, 1GB/month of data transfer, up 10 personalized email addresses (ie. yourname@example.com, sales@example.com etc.), FTP access, free setup and no monthly or hidden fees.
They also offer many low priced packages if your site needs more space or bandwidth but you don't want to have to spend a lot. Again at the time of this review (their prices may have changed since) their Ultra Hosting package is only $7.95/month and includes 1000 MB storage, 20 GB monthly traffic, 100 email accounts, PHP / MySQL / CGI /SSL / Frontpage etc.
Forced Ads: None, it's ad-free.
Mister.Net
"No setup fees, No forced advertising, No banners, No popups, No fine print, No contracts and No hidden charges. Not now. Not Ever!" My sister hosts her domain here and says the service has been great. Their free domain hosting package gives 250 MB disk space, front page extensions, personal cgi-bin, unlimited email accounts, 5 pop mail accounts, 5 Gigs of bandwidth per month, unlimited ftp access, web based site control panel, domain control panel, accept credit cards worldwide, free e-commerce/shopping cart and more. Worth looking into!
Forced Ads: None.
x10Hosting
This free host offers 2 different plans. The first has no ads and offers up to 10 GB of bandwidth, the second plan does have ads but gives up to 45 GB of bandwidth. From the looks of it you get to place the ads yourself so you'll be able to work them into your site's layout better than at some other hosts, also the ad size is based on the plan you choose, for example (at the time of this review) if you just need 20 Gb of bandwidth per month the ad is a text ad, for 40Gb it's a 468 x 60 Banner.
All hosting plans at x10Hosting come with cPanel, Custom Account Panel, Addon Domains, Parked Domains, Sub Domains, FTP Accounts, E-mail (including webmail), PHP and GD Library.
Forced Ads: Your choice depending on the plan you choose.
Fire Productions Hosting
Looking for a free host in The U.K.? This one offers 100Mb of space with 5 Gb Data Transfer, 2 Domains and up to 4 Subdomains! A few nice extras are PHP with 1 MySQL account, a free DNS server a control panel and FTP.
Forced Ads: None.
Award Space
Award Space lets you host 2 domains and have 5 subdomains for free that include 200 MB of free space, 5 GB /month data transfer (bandwidth) and 5 email accounts (both POP3 & IMAP access). A few advanced features available are CGI, PHP Support, SSI and access to 1 MySQL Database as well as access to Web access and error logs. Uploading files to your domain can be done through FTP or browser based upload.
When I tested it I found the service to be fairly reliable with no huge downtimes or slowdowns. The control panel did have a lot of ads, but that's very fair considering they need to pay their bills to be able to keep the hosting free.
Forced Ads: No forced ads at all added to the sites hosted.
FreeHostia
Register a top level domain with them for $19.95 and they give you free domain hosting with 250 MB space and 5 GB monthly bandwidth. A few bonus features are 5 subdomains are available, Perl and PHP with 1 MySQL database and PHPMyAdmin, FrontPage extensions, SSI and many others. Again, I haven't had a chance to test this host (I can only run so many domains at a time ;-) ), but it does look like a good one.
Forced Ads: Nope.
