For around 5 years now, I've hosted this blog on ghost.io. It costs very little to do so, but the platform has never been a good fit for me.
I am really not interested in monetisation or marketing which is the direction their features skew towards. I viscerally hate the 'sign-up for emails' field which is front and central in most of their themes. Yes, I could hide this field with a bit of CSS or build my own theme (I can't, I'm a terrible web designer) but, really, I just want Old Web.
I miss the Y2K era internet. I miss blogs which were written for the sake of it. I miss the nonsense, the noise, the fun of it all.
I'm now hosting this on my own engine, Gutter Press. It's rough and ready but does what I want it to do. I can run it, and some other services on the tiniest of Hetzner instances quite nicely. I don't really care about sending emails from the blog — there's an atom feed, like the Old Web used.
This has been made stupidly simple with the Lexxy rich text editor in Rails (a vast improvement on Trix, even in its beta form).
This content exists as a scratchpad for me. It might be useful for you. Take from it anything useful.