Free Web Hosting Services

Have you ever created a little website for an event or group at a bargain introductory price, and then forgotten about it until you notice huge recurring charges applied to your credit card?  I have, so now I stay away from introductory pricing on web sites.  A few years back there seemed to be dozens of places to host a web site for free, but now there are few choices for general purpose sites with rich site building features that don't have some kind of catch or gotcha to get you to upgrade to a premium plan.

I've looked at a number of pages like this one that lists free hosting services, but they never seem to reveal the catch or gotcha I'd care about for each provider.
So after trying a few services, and finding the gotchas, I thought I'd start a spreadsheet to track this.  Please add information about your favorite free or really cheap hosting sites in the comments, or let me know of any similar comparison charts already out there!  Should there be other features important enough to include in the summary like cron jobs, or number of ftp accounts?

You can share this sheet, or view all sheets, with this link: http://bit.ly/freewebh

This is one of the topics I covered in a WordPress talk for CUCUG, and will expand on for RCSI in May.  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Please share this post with the shortlink: http://bit.ly/CompareFreeHosting

P.S.  I also have a sheet for comparing cheap mobile plans.

Since posting this, many new options have become available besides traditional hosting accounts.  See:

CloudFlare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, Github Pages, and Gitlab Pages. Where to host for free?