Managing the banners

Getting these days confirmed by some advertisers, I wanna start to setup banner ads on my site.

Three ways to do it, came to my mind:

1. Placing manually different bannercodes on each page, like static pictures

2. Using a wordpress banner rotator plugin

3. Setting up an ad server or use a hosted one

While the first one is the easiest one, the biggest problem is: You have to change them by hand all in a while to not let your audience see the same stuff ever. But, having an article and a specific product that links to it, this solution works best.

With wordpress plugins it's always the same for me: If I finally manage to find one that fits my needs, the free version of it, is just missing the most important part that only the premium one delivers :(

So only one way left to hang on, I searched the web. In past times I've used the OpenX Adserver, which was free if you host it your own. It was really good. But today I visited the website and looked thru it more than 15 minutes, but couldn't find any download link, nor prices/services for a hosted ad server. Crazy - a big website, a big product and the only thing you can do is filling out a contact form...

Back to google, I found a Adword-Link at the bottom of the search, redirecting me to Adserver.online . Hmm, not much information to find, just a button "Register, it's free". Ok, I did, still irritated about how can it be free, I read the whole terms and couldn't find any flea. I setted up my first campaigns along with banners. Full statistics, geo targeting, rotation with weight - great, all that I want.

But I'm still left with mixed emotions: Why is this free? If they would stated the mix in 2-3% their banners, I would have no problem. But nothing said, just free, up to 10 million requests/month.
Maybe they want to get new customers for there paid ad services? But is that worth it?

If anyone has some experience with this or any other free ad server, please let me know in the comments here.