am planning to start a mini site just for downloads...which one is preferred free hosting or paid hosting...once if i choose free hosting can i shift to paid hosting later... thanks
Paid hosting is always preferable. Yes, you can later transfer to paid hosting. But be careful while choosing hosts.
Switching from free to paid could be a hassle and involve website downtime if you aren't sure what you're doing. If you want to go free for starters then you could try Godaddy's shared plan that won't cost anything if your domain is registered with them. If you decide to switch to their paid plan and let the free hosting add banner go away, you simply upgrade the existing package, and no need to do anything else. Your website won't go down a second.