If you are doing a comparison between paid and free hosting, then you have to understand that everything depends upon your needs and your goals that you are trying to accomplish. There are some prost and cons of paid and free web hosting, which will be discussed below.

Free Web Hosting:-Advantages:

1. The first and foremost benefit is that that it is totally free.

2. If you want to practice programming, you can do it by using free web hosting. Every free hosting provider doest support some of the programming languages like PHP, ASP, CGI/Perl, Coldfusion or JSP, but some really do support these languages, so there you go.

3. If you want to create a small personal website, then free web hosting should be your option.

Disadvantages:

1. A lot of banners and text ads are placed on your website when you ar hosting it for free.

2 Your website is basically placed as a subdomain like your url is somewhat like this "freehosting.com/yourwebsite", so this can effect your search engine ranking.

3. You do not get any support.

4. The control panel service is often not offered.

5. Free web hosts do not allow you to have ftp access and it is a very major flaw, as you are not allowed to upload any files.

6. The disk space or data transfer space allowed is not that much. So, if your website has great traffic influx, then you are in for trouble.

Paid Web Hosting:-Advantages:

1. Your website will be exclusively yours and there will be no unnecessary text banner ads or anything of the sort.

2. You website will not be a sub-domain any more and you will have better search engine rankings, which will make your site even more professional.

3. Usually every paid web hosting providers offer 24/7 customer support.

4. Control panels like cPanel, Vdeck, Plesk or Ensim are provided, which have a lot of features like like web stats, capability to password protect directories, and the facility to create web based email accounts.

5. Ftp access is offered by almost every web hosting service provider.

6. Generally all of the web hosting service providers support for programming languages like PHP, ASP, CGI/Perl, Coldfusion and JSP.

7. You get more disk space and data transfer with paid web hosting. You are allowed to add additional files to your website and more traffic can be handled.

Disadvantages:

1. There is only disadvantage of paid web hosting service, which is that that you have to pay for the service.