Forum hosting: Free vs Paid

So you want to open a forum but have only limited
experience with such things.

Well you have two basic choices, an ad supported free
forum such as ProBoards, Invisionfree, or SMFforFree.
Or you can use you own hosting account and install the
forum script of you choice such as vBulliten, SMF, or PHPBB.

Some pros and cons of both...

Ad supported free forums:

Pros:
1) It's free! (duh!)

2)They're pretty much fire and forget. By this I mean, once you
set up the account all you have to do is decide how many categories
and forums you want and decide on a theme for it. No need to
worry about backing up the database or any other major maintenance.

Cons:
1) If the company hosting it goes out of business you're sunk.

2) You get to look at ugly ads that are placed as in-your-face
as you can get.
(Firefox with Adblock Plus usually fixes this but not everyone uses FF)

3) You have to work within the host's TOS and a lot of times they
can be awfully picky about the content you can post.

4) Some people tend to (wrongly) look down their noses
at free hosted forums

Hosting it yourself:

Pros:
1) You have full control over the forum and you're the boss.

1a) If your host offers Fantastico or other similar one click script
installers, installing the forum can take only a matter of minutes.

2) It is under your domain name, so if you have a store on
the same site it can give your customers a place to ask questions
or leave you feed back to tell you what works and what doesn't

3) You have greater control over the look and feel of the forum.

Cons:
1) You gotta pay the bills for the upkeep.

2) You're stuck with making sure you have back ups and doing
the needed maintenance. (ICK!)

3) You get to look at ugly ads you put there yourself.
(j/k Well, sorta...)