I don't personally host a blog, but if I were to I'd probably write something simple in vanilla JS, HTML, and CSS and then write the blog articles with Markdown

I don't personally host a blog, but if I were to I'd probably write something simple in vanilla JS, HTML, and CSS and then write the blog articles with Markdown and host it all on GitHub pages. I haven't done it before but I suspect that it would be a feasible way to host a blog for free with (almost) total control over it.