If you are hosting a personal site, a free hosting service may be sufficient. It's your call. If your site is in any way commercial, be aware that free sites do NOT convey a professional image. You don't have a shop for them to walk around, nor do you have samples they can pick up and examine. Er, was that your equally virtual door I just heard banging in the wind as your prospect high-tailed it to the more salubrious looking establishment next door.
Many people simply refuse to do business with sites hosted on free servers for exactly that reason.
As we will see in much more detail later on in the course, search engines and directories are also loading the dice against sites hosted on free servers by refusing to list them at all, or by severely limiting the sites that can get in. By hosting your site on a free server, you are guaranteeing yourself an uphill struggle later when it comes to actually promoting your site. If you are browsing the Internet via an ISP, it is likely that you already have some space allocated to you for your website, even if you don't know about it. There's no hard and fast rule about this, but most ISPs will give you a few megabytes of space in which you can keep your site. Some ISPs have restrictions on the type of site you can host with them for free, such as personal sites only, so you may need to look elsewhere if you will be running a business site.