Brinkster.com (previously eWebCity.com) is the best free host out there. Unfortunately, I took so long to learn that. I was relying on Tripod, Angelfire and Xoom.com (now part of nbci.com) for my free hosting, but with all these you get those annoying ads either as a banner or as a popup window. Now I am happily stuck to Brinkster where I maintain two active sites. And I am much too thrilled with the Brinkster offing.
It is not just that there are no banners or popups, there is no sort of ad.
You get 30 MB of file space, where you can host almost all kinds of files.
The URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) of your site will be of the form https://lt;number>.brinkster.com/<membername>, where <number> will the number of their server at the time when you join, and <membername> is what you choose as your member name. I agree that it is not that user-friendly, but it is much more than worth the features that they offer.
Brinkster gives support for MS Access database, where I now keep my own guestbook, forum and other dynamic stuff. I am now building my own user-authentication system (login-password) for one of my sites at Brinkster based on this database. You can use ADO (ActiveX Data Objects), which enables you to write very fast database oriented programs in a limited time.
You also get a directory with write permissions where you can upload files from your own pages!
Administration is through a web-based file manager, which makes it comfortable. For FTP based management you have to pay around $13 per month, but then you get a lot more features (like more than 25 IIS components) if you are willing to pay.
The site also has a good collection of articles on ASP, HTML, JavaScript and SQL to help you get on track faster.
You can view my site at https://.brinkster.com/beens