1. Write in Markdown, useful for technical writing. 2. Have it look decent.

But if I was doing non-technical content I'd possibly go with something hosted. And for all I know wordpress.com or something has the markdown plugin setup by default these days.

I originally hand coded my blogs and got very little actual writing done. I moved to Word Press and got a little more actual writing done. I moved to BlogSpot and I get a lot more writing done, though I hear people talk trash about it all the time.

Do whatever allows you to focus on the writing, not the backend.

I'm personally using Github Pages (with Jekyll). I've never paid anything, and except for some version upgrade a while back, haven't had to do any maintenance. As for the upfront cost, it took me a bit to get a Jekyll theme to work out for me, and I'm not particularly fluent with Ruby. Good luck.

I prefer ghost.

In the end, as someone else said, this decision & later maintenance is the easy part. Writing is the hard part.

If you run wordpress, you will deal with a hack sooner or later. I would only use it if you require functionality that exists in plugins that you can't or don't want to replicate for your platform.

(ps: we are currently in private beta, will send an invite soon)