Looking to get a couple small low-traffic pages hosted. Anybody ever use one of these free web hosts? Any good experiences with any of them?

The free sites are pretty much lousy. GoDaddy has some cheap hosting, they tend to overload their servers and slow everything down but for small sites they're fine. If you get the hosting for multiple sites my experience is that they're good. I use them for the last 2 sites I have.

pretty sure my brother uses Host Gator and is pretty pleased with value/quality

I found ad-free free hosting, at x10hosting.com, seems ok so far. Bought a domain name from Register and told them to forward it to our site at x10. They're telling me now unless I want a banner with an ad across the bottom of my website that I need to kick down another 49.99 for "premium" forwarding.

That's not legit, is it? I thought once I owned a domain name it was mine to point where the heck I wanted. Did I screw up by buying from Register.com, or are they just playing games and not telling me the right way to get my domain name forwarded without their crappy ad banner?

I use: No Support Linux Hosting - cPanel Powered Linux Web Hosting

Its $1 a month, and gets the job done. I just put $12 in a year, and forget about it.

I've heard good things about bluehost

Kind of like asking for a fast/cheap/reliable car all at once.

I don't believe free anything exists. From my experience, I have never found a free web service that was worth messing with. It's always some sort of promotion or marketing ploy to eventually try and sell you something.

What you experienced is quite normal... all these hosting companies that offer free anything know what they are doing. They will throw whatever curve ball they have available to push you into a paid plan.

You may own the domain name through the registrar, but where you point it could be a different business. Registrar just gets you the name, and some control over DNS records. Along with other services they might offer like private registration (which I always buy).

I have used GoDaddy, Namecheap, Bluehost, and a few others, but for my sanity and for simplicity I moved everything I have to Network Solutions.

I dislike them all, but I dislike Network Solutions the least.