I have been trying to host personal website consisting of few static pages, a blog and a gallery time and again. I didn't want to spend any money directly in this task. Bring a non computer guy and with little knowledge of programming except in HTML, C, C++, VB, I was faced with really a tough task. I made numbers of sites using DreamWeaver and finally settled on 110mb.com with shivkr.110mb.com but unfortunately they went paid for Database and my site become defunct. Again the search for a free web site initiated. I tried number of them, including x10hosting.com (good one), freehyperspace.com, freejoomlas.com, directspace.net, awardspace.com, free-space.net (application rejected), free-web-hosting.biz, iifree.net, sitewith.us and many more ... I also tried www.freehostia.com but it had one database in free account so, i couldn't have both blog and gallery on the site and i didn't try at the first stance.
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With time I understood, that Content Management Systems are much better tools than trying to integrate many PHP softwares on a single site. I also learned that Wordpress itself is a very good CMS basically for blogging but can have few static pages and can have gallery by using plugins. So I decided to go with Wordpress, one of the most easy CMS.
Still, my search for reliable free host continued. Then my long time companions in free web hosting www.free-webhosts.com and www.freewebhostingtalk.com reminded of many sites including fatehost.com, byethost.com, 000webhosts.com, Xpesshost.com, vlexo.com, profusehost.net, etc. but each come with limitation like their banner ads or restricted file types and so on.
After lots of research in reliability, speed and functionality of web sites, I have decided that <a href="http://www.freehostia.com" target="_blank">www.freehostia.com</a> serves my purpose well. It has really fast FTP server, no ads on my site, supports 1 MySQL database but the max size is 10 MB, which is more than sufficient for my hosting also comes with no limitation of file types. Only limitation I found was 500 KB file size but thats good to maintain the site as web hosting site otherwise people will spam the service and use it like file hosting site, which will hurt the interest of other web site.
Its control panel is quite advanced and i am still learning about it and may be will write a guide on it later. But for now let me enjoy my new website and see how long it lasts. (Lots of modification in themes and plugins to be done...)