Ghost is $300/year just to show up and not have extreme limitations on customization. You can't even increase the size of the tiny fonts on the few available themes to something accessible on the base plan.
Wordpress.com recently completely revamped its pricing, pissing everyone off, then walked it back. And it's unclear what motivated it, or what's to come. This is the kind of omen that preceded Patreon's fall from obvious choice to reluctant best option of a bunch of bad or incomplete solutions. Automattic's pricing is more reasonable now, but the single $180/year plan they tried and walked back from hangs over it. It tells me they wanted to shift away from casual bloggers (like someone who doesn't want to worry about maintaining a .org install) to people who are willing and able to pay triple digits for all the features for business or personal PR purposes.
Interesting, I didn't realize either option were so expensive now! As an alternative, maybe something like Dreamhost's $10/yr plan and one-click wordpress installer?
DigitalOcean also has one-click installers/images available for ghost and wordpress, but would still be at least $5/mo.
Both of these options start to go back towards the burden of having to maintain them though.
I don't know if it exists, but maybe there's room for something like a desktop version of Ghost that allows you to write posts/etc locally and then publish to a static github-pages (or s3/etc) site.
Wordpress.com recently completely revamped its pricing, pissing everyone off, then walked it back. And it's unclear what motivated it, or what's to come. This is the kind of omen that preceded Patreon's fall from obvious choice to reluctant best option of a bunch of bad or incomplete solutions. Automattic's pricing is more reasonable now, but the single $180/year plan they tried and walked back from hangs over it. It tells me they wanted to shift away from casual bloggers (like someone who doesn't want to worry about maintaining a .org install) to people who are willing and able to pay triple digits for all the features for business or personal PR purposes.