Moved to Echo Lounge
As PHPonCrack stated, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, somewhere, someone has to pay for what you use (and usually it's you paying by having ads on your site).
I don't know of any free hosts, as a free host offers you little flexibility to your site. A "cheaper" solution is to find an overselling host. Someone like Servage.net or hostgator.com or hostrocket.com are pretty good shared hosting providers. I know they all have crontabs and some sort of control panel that you can use.
I do know that many free hosts that are truly free, don't offer MySQL because many consider it a "premium" feature and because it usually means you have a "popular" or "large" site (since many many personal sites are just photo galleries and blogs which don't have to have database backends), so you'd be willing to pay for space.
Hope that helps.