Gotta hit some middle ground here. Until a month ago, I would have said the same thing as the naysayers.
But now I see that free web hosting has its place. In my case, I found it useful to run Open Source web site monitoring software that gave me more control over things than any affordable service out there. After all, you can’t install web monitoring on the same host as what you are monitoring!
I, too, ended up with x10hosting.com. While I wouldn’t classify it as “good”, it is probably as “acceptable” as you are going to find. By my standards, response time is slow all the time. Sometimes unbearably so. And you can forget about getting outgoing e-mails to work; it is forever getting tagged as a spammer.
If you put WordPress on x10, you are going to frustrate your visitors with the slow response.
On the other hand, if all you want is a place to test before you put out your hard earned money for paid hosting, why not use the 30-100 day money-back guarantees of a paid host you will want to use eventually anyway? That is how I selected my last host. Lots of research, but it took actually signing up before I knew what it “really” was like. Went through three hosts before I found one that was even acceptable to my needs, all in the course of 24 hours. Been happy for 2 1/2 years now, so it was worth the effort.
