Bad Web Hosting = Bad SEO!
Free Hosting
I do not recommend free hosting. With the plague of garbage on the web many people may not be willing to link to sites that reside on a free host. Free hosts usually use your content to build link popularity or put some ugly banners on your site, which ruin the page flow and make it look exceptionally unprofessional. A commercially-oriented website needs to show significantly greater quality for me to want to link to it if it resides on a free host.
I have seen some blogs that were hosted at Blogspot (Blogger's free host) do all right, but that exception is based on the fact that blogs are generally more personal in nature and not so commercially driven. Even those blogs would probably be better off if they used a more feature-rich blogging engine. Plus, if they ever want to move their site, it is hard to consolidate the link popularity they built up if all those links point at a Blogspot location.
If you create a subdomain from a free site and eventually want to move your site, it may be hard to move some of that link popularity, and aged domain trust you developed, to the new location.
Cheap Hosting
There are many risks with bad, cheap hosting, but decent, cheap hosting of secondary type sites can help diversify your business model and lessen the risk if your main site goes down. One cheap host I have used is 3.75 hosting.
Once I renewed my credit card and forgot to give them my changed credit card details and my sites immediately went down without warning. That is just one example of the type of things you can expect from cheap hosting providers.
If you are unsure how reliable your host is, you may want to use a tracking service such as Internet Seer.
A Word of Advice = Host in Your Country
Many major search engines give sites a relevancy boost if they are hosted in the same location as the local search market. In some locations, local hosting may not be economical, but if you are promoting a site primarily geared toward the U.K., you would want to host that site in the U.K.
Popularity: 9% [?]
