At first it was hosted on http://peterburk.free.fr, my parents' ISP. That was fine until I no longer lived with them, and I can't trust that it'll always be available. Also, I wanted a .com subdomain instead of a .fr domain.
So in 2011, I moved to http://peterburk.appspot.com on Google App Engine. No problem, until I moved to China in 2013. All Google services are blocked there, including my page. So I migrated to http://peter-burk.rhcloud.com (Red Hat OpenShift). I didn't like the mandatory dash in the subdomain, so I also set up http://peterburk.tumblr.com to redirect. RHCloud supported PHP, so I could finally run WordPress.
Then RHCloud changed to being paid-only, so in 2015 I moved to https://peterburk.github.com and couldn't use PHP again. Now I code everything in client-side JavaScript and static HTML. More recently, Github removed the .com subdomain service, so my Chinese-learning side project is https://pingtype.github.io and that confuses some users. If something happens to Github, I might try to hop to heroku, but http://peterburk.herokuapp.com is pretty long to type.
What do other people do for ad-free hosting? I think most sites pay for AWS, but I can't have a credit card because I'm a foreigner. The design of my site is very basic, because I've had to re-write it 4 times already, typically every 2 years. I choose technologies based on the platform features, so I did know all about GAE, but now I'm more familiar with Git. My loyalty isn't to the code management tool (this is for side projects, not a business that would need collaboration with colleagues), I just move to wherever is free/not blocked by China/has an easy-to-remember domain name.