Free website hosting companies offer you web hosting service where you get
free web space on their hosting server to create and host your web site free.
Usually in exchange for these free hosting services, the free web
hosting company places advertisements on your free web pages of some sort
(banners, textlinks, popups, etc.) to cover their costs; some free website hosts
also provide free bannerless hosting (no ads, no popups, and no advert of any kind),
and they make money in other ways; some free web page hosts offer very limited
services (such as limited web page space, bandwidth limit, and no scripting)
to attract users and hope that many people upgrade to a paid webhosting service.
Many free website hosts provide a subdomain for free.
You just have to decite what you need and pick the one offering you just that.