keeping costs low is ok, but not when it comes to hosting. The hosting is the first, and most important part of having an online business and if you cut down the costs with hosting then you've already sabotaged your entire business. Take it from someone who's jumped from free (initially) and cheap (later on) hosting to free / cheap hosting for years until I've learn the importance of having a hosting provider that doesn't throttle your bandwidth when you reach a certain amount of traffic per day / month, who doesn't charge you extra (or even up to 3x the initial cost) without sending even a warning message about the fees, or who doesn't reply to your support tickets EVER.
I'm not saying that 000webhost does all of these, but having used free hosting in the past I can guarantee you that they do at least one of these, and that's when they don't put their ads on your sites or does some other shady stuff that you're not aware of as a beginner.
So, do not be a cheapskate when it comes to hosting, just buy what's best on the market that falls within your budget, and if you can't afford a hosting provider for even $10-20 an year then you're not ready to do business online. Some hosts are really cheap nowadays. Of course, they're shared hosting, so this means that you're going to share the server with other people who may, or may not jeopardize your sites, but it's still better to start with shared hosting then with free one.
Hostkoala, for example, have very affordable plans starting at only $5 per year, and if you can't afford to spend $5 on hosting then I don't know what to tell you
elementor bloats your site, I don't recommend it
some of the things that I'd like to see before buying hosting are...
a) unlimited everything (bandwith, storage, domains, databases, emails, inodes, etc)
Of course, no hosting provider is going to offer unlimited storage (not for cheap anyway), so I don't really expect this to be offered, but I just mentioned it for the fun of it. Also, inodes... inodes means files, and no hosting provider mentions inodes on their salespage, which really pisses me off beyond reason because I consider this to be deceiving marketing because you can be offered "unlimited storage" but if they only allow you to host 100k files (inodes) then what's the point of having unlimited storage? I've not seen a single hosting provider making their inodes limit visible on the salespage, I always have to check the knowledge base or even contact them to inquire about this, which really bothers me since it's such an important feature because your typical Wordpress blog can easily consist of several 1000s of inodes, and if you intend to host 10 or 20 such blogs then you might reach the file limit very fast.
b) free SSL... this is especially important if you wish to cut down your costs. If you don't care about paying $8 or $9 per year, per SSL, then this point doesn't interest you. But if you do care about SSL fees, then know that most good hosting providers offer free SSL, but some of them (Namecheap for example) offer free SSL only for the 1st year. After that, you will need to pay for SSL and when you have 12-15 sites that's over $100 per year in SSL alone. Now, if SSL being paid feature was the industry standard you'd roll with it, but since most hosting providers offer SSL free of charge but some of them don't... well, you'll probably want to go with the free option in this case
c) support... before choosing hosting I almost always contact support (I usually inquire about the inodes limits and what will happen if I cross this limit, but you can ask whatever you want, just to test their knowledge, attitude and response time) to see how they respond. If they respond within 24 hours, politely and know what they're talking about I almost always end up buying hosting from that provider
There might be more considerations to take into account (like server locations, or backup options for example), but I'm not going through those yet. These 3 points should be enough to understand and base your pick on as a beginner. Just don't use free hosting, it's not worth it. You can use free hosting to test new stuff or to learn how hosting works, for those purposes it's fine! But don't host your money makers with free hosting
