kobuk,
If you're still looking, I used to write html code myself, and hosted it online through small webhosts, but I somewhat knew who was doing the hosting to not get taken advantage of. That's the hardest part, just finding someone that will give you a decent deal and its hard to know who will. Wordpress seems to put ads on their free sites according to their plans page. I don't know how big the ads are, but there's no way around it. Also, they fail to mention how much bandwith you get and what happens if you go over the monthly limit. Even the paid plans don't list bandwith limits. Maybe there aren't any, I don't know. I've heard of them, so they probably aren't a bad place to start if you were really interested in using them. Couldn't hurt if time is all you have to lose.
The web standards and new coding algorithms (CSS and others) have changed over the years, and I just haven't had the time to learn, so I've let sites like Weebly and Google Sites to do all those fancy little things for me within the past three years. Yes sometimes they pop in junk redundant code, but nothing I couldn't fix. I know Google Sites does not put ads on my site, but I don't have my own domain through them (didn't bother me, I think I could point one there if I ever wanted to). One benefit I suppose is because its google, certain search terms would put my site at #1 or #2 on the first page, so they must automatically code their own hosted sites to rise to the top of their search engine.