[sergiomattei]

It was pretty great! There were a ton of free webhosts back then, they really fueled my creativity and desire to learn web dev.

000webhost, x10Hosting and SixServe (both had FREE cPanel!!), and never forget those shady reseller control panel hosts like Nazuka.

[depaya]

Hunting around for free cPanel hosting was essentially my part time job when I was 12-18. Many of them required certain forum activity too, so it could get time consuming.

[sergiomattei]

Same here! Hours and hours searching.

I'll admit though, the shady reseller hosts were pretty good. Terrible control panel aside, they had very generous CPU/bandwidth/storage limits compared to the free cPanel hosts that had to cut down the costs there.