Can you launch a website for free?

[Jake]

There are plenty of free hosts, generally with limitations or strings. For $8/mo or so you can get an 'unlimited' shared hosting account without those limitations ans can add additional sites at an effective cost of $1 each for added domain names
If you have no programming experience you might consider using a blog host, you can pick pre-designed design 'themes', you add content by more or less filling in forms. I'm most familiar with Google's Blogger.com with no paid upgrades and relatively few editorial restrictions, it's their own relatively simple blog design, Wordpress.com is the ree hosted, slightly limited version of the industry standard open source blog platform used in some 17% of the top 1 Million sites, what you learn there can be transferred to your own paid hosting site where you can use more plugins to customize the functionality, Wordpress.com does charge a fee for certain features or for making money from the site.

To see examples of free blogs, you can Google search: site:blogspot.com intitle:"your interest"
This gets you the cheapies without a custom domain name.

One important consideration is whether you want to use an included subdomain, kinda like a PO Box yourSite.blogspot.com or get a paid custom domain name at about $12/yr like YourSite.com the big advantage of a custom name, you can relocate with relatively small interruption compared to losing a subdomain at the free hosts whim and needing to rebuild search ranking, backlinks and traffic. Some like Blogger.com have no problem with domains obtained elsewhere for about $12 a year, others like Wordpress.com I believe charge a fee for a custom name.

Others can name conventional site free hosts, one of the social hosts might be appropriate depending on what your up to.