I started out, looking for companies that offered free web hosting.  These companies make their money through other ways besides webmaster hosting fees.  They do so usually one of three or four ways.  The most popular seems to be placing their ads on your website pages.  Not a lot of people like this, and I’m one of them.   For the time being, I stay away from these, as I hate others ads on my sites.  Another approach some take, is that they hope as your website grows you will eventually move to a paid plan from them that has more benefits.  Disk space, CPU, bandwidth etc.   These were my favorite.   A third approach, is to force you post actively in their forum to keep your account active.  This way they grow an active community of webmasters, and attempt to monetize this community through ads or offers.  A fourth, and my least favorite, is a group that tries to get you to sign up for some promotional offer from a third party company (for which they get a kickback) before you get a free account.

However, I grew tired of trying to find good free web hosting accounts.  I also grew tired of their spotty support.   Lately, I’ve been searching out small companies that offer hosting for $10 to $20 per year.  They are usually resellers of larger host providers, but that’s ok with me.  It means I get lots of IPs for about a $1 or $2 per month per IP.  Plus, I can spread sites out across multiple physical machines.  If one server has problems, it only affects one website.  There’s nothing I hate more, than having a website down.  It can be a pain though, so finally finding a company that offers multiple IP hosting at a reasonable price is quite a relief.