You don't need to live North America to take advantage of the many free web hosting providers that are available there.
It actually doesn't matter where you live as long as you have a credit card and can pay the domain registration and web hosting costs (if you should decide on a paid-hosting package).
Web hosting location only comes into play when you're targeting local audiences. For example, if you live in the UK and your business is targeted to customers in the UK, search engines seem to give preference to locally hosted sites. If you do a search using Yahoo.com and Yahoo.co.uk for a keyword, you will generally see two very different set of search results.
