Probably not. For free you can get some static web space and very limited bandwidth. For $15/month, you can get what you describe. Personally, I have a DSL line with a static IP address. Then I can experement with various back end technologies without some anonymous admin pulling the strings.
Not really, and you want to be careful of shared Java Web hosting. For this one company I tried, the JSP/Servlets went down all the time because other people wrote bad code and the environment was shared. JVMs are much more sensitive than most servers for JSPs/Servlet and shared hosting can be a big pain.