There is an over-quoted sentence in web hosting industry “you get what you pay for”. It is true, sometimes. But often, you do not get what you pay for.

Generally you may get some kind of customer support for paid hosting; while for free hosting, support may be available only through community. In addition, there are fewer restrictions for paid hosting. But if it is just a personal homepage, do you need these? Shared hosting is not expensive nowadays, but ten dollars a month for users in some less developed countries may be not cheap.

The keyword is your requirements. If you need someone monitor your site 7/24/365 and want a clean homepage, you should go paid hosting. For the hardware, a lot of free hosting providers use very decent servers and transit, which maybe are better than those used by some paid hosting providers.

The most important thing is to remember “you may not get what you pay for” for paid hosting if you fail to choose provider properly. It is so easy to start hosting services, e.g., you can get a very cheap reseller account on some auctions sites, that a lot of providers do not have the necessary qualifications. This also happens to free hosting.

So, what’s your answer? My answer is there are some good hosting providers, free and paid; there are also many bad hosting providers, free and paid.