If you're new in website creating, you don't want to pay cash for hosting. You can host your site for free. It's not bad idea if your site has few users and your data storage and bandwidth are small. I've used some free hosting sites too.
3 best free hosting sites in my opinion:

#1 Freehostia
Data storage: 250 MB
Monthly bandwidth: 5 GB
Hosting for 2 domains
NO ADS
PHP & Perl enabled
1 MySQL database
10 MB MySQL DB space
You can elefante free scripts
http://www.freehostia.com/

#2 Adwarspace
200MB disk space
5GB traffic
2 domains hosting
PHP
Perl
Mysql
FTP
Instant activation

http://www.awardspace.com/

#3 110mb
5GB disk space
300GB Monthly Bandwidth
99.8% Uptime Guarantee
PHP 4 & 5
Online File Manager
http://www.110mb.com

I agree that there are quite a good free hosting websites available like 110mb. However if you are looking for something professional for your site it is better to stick with paid hosting plans. If anything unfortunate happens to the free hosted servers than the entire work on the website would be last if there was no back up further the control panel of free hosting sites are quite basic.

I agree with Andrew. It's better to go directly for paid hosting service if you are serious in developing your website. Anyway, why do I not see 000webhost.com in the list? It is a good free hosting service which is even better than some paid hosting services.

I won't recommend even a beginning webmaster to use free hosting service. It is just not worth it. You will never know if your site would grow to the extent that it needs better web hosting service. In that case, you will have to deal with website transfer which is not always as smooth as you expect.

Consider the fact that most hosting control panels/ ftp options are different. The difference between "free" hosting and paid can be very different as well. If you learn to maintain a site on free hosting then move up, you are going to be missing out on a ton of things.

To me, there's no such thing as free. What's the trade-off? The free hosting sites that I've seen require that you allow them to advertise on your website. If I'm running an e-commerce site, I don't want someone else's advertising on my site.

Good points Brady. If I'm going to put the effort into a site, I'd rather pay even a small fee than risk that my "free" site hosting will have lots of down time or other problems associated with it. You can find so many great providers for so little these days.

Meanwhile, if you insist on trying a free web hosting service, you had better go for a free web hosting package which allows you to upgrade it to a paid hosting package. Using the way, you will get less problem when it comes to getting more reliable web hosting due to your website's growth.