Two decades ago when internet was rather a new term to a lot of people, web hosting service was mostly available for server use by large companies. However, when internet became common in the past 15 years, not only a large number of business websites were created but also many individual users started their personal websites for both leisure and profit-seeking purposes.
A lot of personal websites were created for sharing the website owners' expertise in different areas. For example, a lot of web bloggers shared their reviews on food, restaurant, technologies, shopping deals, just to name a few. These blogs were good channels for businesses to place related advertisements to attract the blogs' readers. According to Businessinsider.com, in 2009, there were over 20 million bloggers in USA, with 1.7 million making profits from their websites. Bloggers could earn $75 to $200 for a blog post about products and services.
To start a blog, you need to own a website. There are a lot of free web hosting providers offering free website names. In fact, these website names are only sub-domains of the addresses of such the hosting providers (e.g. http://YourMemberID.freewebhostingserviceprovider.com/). In general, such free web hosting services do not allow users to place advertisement banners on the websites. In other cases, forced ads are put by your free web hosting service providers and the advertisements revenue will go to your free web hosting service providers to cover your web hosting costs.
For new blog writers, the best solution is to acquire free web hosting services with limited but sufficient web storage and bandwidth traffic for a startup blog. It is important to ensure that there is no forced ad requirement in the free web hosting services. Also, a personalized domain name will definitely look more professional than a sub-domain of a free web hosting service provider. You are now all set to go and start making money with free web hosting services.