There are dozens of free web hosting offers provided by different companies for WordPress bloggers that claim lots of features at no price. Have you ever tried these services and how was your experience? I am not talking about WordPress.com or Blogger.com which are highly reliable and robust blog hosting services. My focus is on other web hosting services that come up with alluring free hosting plans to attract potential clients. Their strategy is to build a free plan user-base and later on try to persuade them to upgrade to a paid plan. If you've ever tried them, you better know the associated pitfalls. I've tried to tabulate all the common shortcomings one may face while 
If you're using one of such free services for quite some time, you may relate to some of the pitfalls mentioned below. These pitfalls are just so commonly found in almost every such free offering.If you're planning to create a small personal blog with occasional updates you may opt for these free plans, but if you have a professional money-making blog, opting for these free plans can prove fatal.
Here are some of the reasons that may stop you from going ahead with free web hosting.
Limited disk space - If you post multiple times a day with lots of illustrations, you may run out of disk space on a free plan. Either they have limited disk space or you get a limited number of inodes (number of files).
Limited bandwidth - Now this is quite obvious. The amount of data transfer is one of the most important resources included in any web hosting plan. If your blog is getting decent traffic, you may run out of your data transfer limit before month-end.
Limited database resources - Nowadays almost all websites are slowly migrating to a content management system that requires a database management system in the backend. If you're hosting your blog on WordPress, you require at least one database on MySQL. Free plans either have no MySQL support or have only 1 database with very little disk space. This greatly reduces the amount of content you can post on your blog.
Frequent downtimes - Generally free web hosting accounts face unscheduled downtimes for long periods to cater the available resources to paid accounts. This makes your blog unavailable to visitors without any notice.
Limit on file size - If you want to host a high-resolution image or a podcast or tutorial video, you cannot use your free plan to do so. Every free hosting plan has strict file size limits.
Short & unreliable FTP sessions - This is yet another annoying 'feature' of a free hosting plan. You not only get a very short FTP session, but the connection is also very unreliable with lots of failed file transfers during a single session.
Trimmed down apache server - Every free hosting account comes with a trimmed down apache server where several important modules are either turned off or have limits. This results in an inability to install several important plugins like W3 Total Cache.
Unsolicited advertisements - This is one of the pitfalls that exist in a free web hosting plan. You never know when unsolicited advertisements start appearing on your blog. The only way to get rid of these adverts is to upgrade to a paid plan.
Account termination without any notice - Although sometimes users abuse the free hosting plan and their accounts are terminated to force fair usage policy, sometimes accounts that are not indulging in any kind of malign activity face account termination without any notice. This can be a huge blow if you've not backed up your blog.
