"Free website hosting plans" are a type of web hosting service where you get free web space on their hosting server to create and host your web site free. Free web page hosting has several advantages, but mainly that it costs nothing (no money and no credit cards needed). Free web site hosting services also often have several disadvantages (though a few actually surpass some of the cheapest paid hosting servers in some features), such as limited webhosting features and forced ads. Usually in exchange for these free hosting services, the free web hosting company places advertisements on your free web pages of some sort (banners, textlinks, popups, etc.) to cover their costs, and hopefully make a profit. However there are some free website hosts that provide free bannerless hosting (no ads, no popups, and no advert of any kind), so they make money in other ways, such as displaying ads for the webmaster to click in their control panel, sending email ads, or requiring forum posting (which of course displays ads, as well as causing you to create free website content for them). Other free web page hosts offer very limited services (such as limited web page space, bandwidth limit, and no scripting) to attract users and hope that many people upgrade to a paid webhosting service. Many free website hosts provide a subdomain or sub-directory of their own domainname instead of (or an option to) allowing its users to host their own top-level domain name free. Most of the free webpage hosting providers over the years have proven to often not be reliable servers, but most of the free hosts listed on this web site have been in service several years, so are more reliable than most newer free hosts.