I really like hugo. Everything is written in Markdown and its pretty light. Definitely not as heavy as a full CMS. I also think the themes are pretty nice.

To deploy it you can use github pages or some cloud services (the hugo site lists some).

Its also pretty flexible, so its pretty easy to change how you want to deploy it, or change the look.

Depends on what you want exactly. Easy and self-hosted are not usually go well together unless you’ve got enough experience.

Easiest way for blog - use a platform. WordPress.com is great and has free tier.

More involved, but still relatively easy - static site generator. I use Hugo myself, there is Jakyll that is popular too. Host it for free on GitHub or GitLab pages.

I would not self-host a public web site for security reasons. But you can run a static site on some cloud service. A personal blog with small audience should be fine on Oracle free tier.

With a static site generator you can host it for free with Cloudflare Pages.

I don’t use it myself, but there’s a federated blogging service called WriteFreely that markets itself as being very minimalist and simple.

You can self-host an instance of it, just like you can with /kbin, or you can use an instance that already exists (I think it’s a few bucks a month if you don’t want to post anonymously).

Not sure if federation is something that’s important to you but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Hugo is awesome, check my go/markdown based site: https://sv1sjp.github.io

Static sites are okay. The problem starts with sites with comment section, searches etc which can be very vulnerable.

I also recommend a static site builder- you dont have to fuss with database or security, you can host with a simple http server, and it’s easy to work with. Hugo, Jekyll, etc

I find a blog is something I won’t self host since my homelab is mostly a dev environment and with that it isn’t super available.

However I do recommend github pages and use some jekyll theme.

Other than that, you can always self host Hugo or Ghost, although when I tried that I always found I ran into issues.

I tried on 3 widely separated occasions and still found issues so maybe it’s a problem with me or my environment.

Either way, people seem to mention those two so I’d recommend them if you want to selfhost, if not, github pages.

If you want to self-host it on a server, WriteFreely is as lean text focused platform. Lightweight and pretty easy to spin up and has some basic federation abilities.

If you’re a bit more adventurous, I have a soft spot for Plume it is still under development so can be a little more work to get running, but it does have the ability to host images with a built in media manager and more federation interactivity between instances of Plume and also the rest of the fediverse.

If you’re on a web host, can’t go wrong with WordPress just make sure to use the cache plugins to make sure it is a bit less sluggish.

Find a static site generator you can tolerate and style things the way you want, have the static files be generated, pick your favorite way to host and server up those static files.

It’s not self hosted, but you might like 750words as well.

I do that. I have WordPress.org with classic editor enabled and the raw html plugin. Use a classic layout like twenty twelve if you don’t want the fancy effects. Look for a host that has softaculous or something similar to automate the installation. My host charges about £60 pa with unlimited bandwidth.

You can also use WordPress.com for free but it has Gutenberg, which I absolutely cannot bear. Some people like it though. It’s also less customisable.

WordPress?