Advantages:

•  Free (of course!)
• Services such as Tripod and Yahoo provide pre-designed style templates and an online content management system (CMS) which makes it relat­ ively easy for a first time user to get their site up and running fairly quickly.

Disadvantages:

• Can be slow to deliver pages to the user.
• No guaranteed reliability.
• Are usually advert-sponsored so users will have to put up with pop up ads etc.
• You don't have your own domain name - just a sub domain e.g. your­ name.freehostname.com or freehostname.com/yourname. This makes you look unprofessional.
• Moreover, if you aren't happy you can't move a sub domain to another supplier.
• Often difficult when it comes to domain transfers - If they provide a free or very cheap domain you often have to pay (sometimes a hefty fee) to move the domain name to another web host.
• Some are also connected with spammers so you (and your users if they input their email address onto a web enquiry form) could end up with a lot of junk email!

Conclusion: free hosting is only really suitable for personal websites. For ex­ ample, many people place their family trees on Geocities or Tripod. They are fine for this sort of thing, but not for a professional business!