Is Hosting (even free) officially Dead?

Dotgeek back in 2003 was the first free PHP 5 hosting. After a long absence we have resurrected a free hosting for geeks with Ruby, PHP, Perl and even MySQL but are developers still interested in traditional hosting (even if free)? We have SSD drives, a fast connectivity and plenty of RAM but one wonders if in the era of dynos, cloud apps and EC2 a geek - even someone just starting to learn web development could have any use for old fashioned hosting ?