You usually get what you pay for. The "free" websites (which usually piggyback your site to back of their ISP address) usually have a lot of advertising and pop-ups that come with them. Geocities and yahoo are rather notorius for these irritations.
One of the main ISP domain hosting services is Network Solutions. Domain hosting is very inexpensive, usually less than $50 a year for your domain name.
If you just have a standard website (with no E-Commerce capability, accepting credit cards), most of the "for pay" providers can give you anywhere from a 5 to 15 page site for around $250. a year, more or less.
I think that most all of the major search engine operations have "free" website, such as Yahoo, Geocities, Lycos, and the others.
Again, if you don't want other's advertising pop-ups and pop-unders coming on your website, pay for a domain name and website which has ONLY your own name information on the address.
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