It depends what you want from it really. The trouble with freebies is they're usually pig slow, banner sponsored in some way, unreliable, or all of the above It's rare to find a decent one.
I used to be in the business years ago and when I chucked it in I went for hosting with Freethought as they had a good rep within the trade. I co-located at first and have now scaled it back to a few Windows and Linux sites. Never had any problems at all.
For £15 a year you can get the smallest package with Plesk/cPanel control panels or Windows if you prefer.
Who ever you use just make sure your bandwidth quota is going to cover it, and depending what you're doing with the DB, check if its localhost aceess only
cheers mate for info not for me but a mate
as far as i know speed not an issue or even bandwidth to a point but remote access needed
will pass it on cheers
Why don't you look for a vps? there are some very cheap and you can install what you want.
I have one on host1plus and works great.
Start with a linux distro, install apache and mysql and you're done!