Is paying for my hosting a good idea?

My freind and I have been working on a project for a while. It got a lot of traffic when we first started it, but began to get bored and didnt maintain it at all. We've been paying $8.95 every month with hostgator. We are re-coding the site and are planning on deploying it soon. Should we still use Hostgator, or is there a free alternative we could use for the small amount of traffic we will recieve? (Around 500-1000 hits a day)