It depends on what is more important to you: do your blog have to be ultimately easy, instantly working and that's all. Or do you need ultimate control over it

It depends on what is more important to you: do your blog have to be ultimately easy, instantly working and that's all. Or do you need ultimate control over it and to have your data where you decide to. In the first case go for Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress.com, Blogger..., in the second case go for a self hosted blog like Wordpress.org, Jekyll, fugitive, DotClear... And since you ask for personal experience: I've always prefered to host my own data so I'm in the second case, also I've almost always written my blogging engines myself (fugitive is the first I open source thought) since what I wanted didn't exists (a git managed blog, with nothing more than git).