Update: Jumba now no longer offers free hosting.

Free web hostings that are feature-packed, advertisement-free, stable and fast are hard to come by. Usually they either came strings-attached, or filled your sites with popup ads, or gone totally disappeared from the surface of this planet within a year (together with your sites).

Well, you can always gone paid hosting, especially when they are super-cheap these days. (Check my $88 off promotion code for DreamHost). However, if you insist not spend any money, I have also found Jumba Interactive Group (formally known as Alternative.net.au) provides free hosting plans on one of their US-based servers. Update 2006-04-11: Jumba now offers Australian server free hosting, after Net Logistics offered theirs earlier this month.

You get:

And it comes with PHP5 w/ Zend, MySQL 4.1, PostgreSQL 7, Perl 5, RoR, Tomcat that runs most open source web applications out there. There are some restrictions. For example, you cannot run commercial sites on their free hosting service, but you can set up advertisement to monetize your site. Perfect for personal blogsites.

If you do not want to pay for a domain — freedns.afraid.org has lots of good sub-domains to choose from — and free!

(Note: currently FOCUSer.net offers free WordPress hosting for current and ex-focus members. That gives you only 50Mb though, and runs on my dodgy 6 years old hardware and a relatively tiny 512kbps pipe. So Jumba is a much better offer.)