I tried Markdown->Hugo->Cloudflare pages route. If you need all bells and whistles of Wordpress you can generate static pages off a local wordpress installation[0] using a WP plugin[1] and host in Cloudflare pages

[0] https://localwp.com/

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

How about github pages?

Seconding this suggestion; no ads, good speed, and complete control over the look and feel of your blog. You can even point your domain at it.

Check out Ichi.city

https://ichi.city/

NeoCities is one option [1]

[1] - https://neocities.org/

I'm a fan of timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog [1]. It's easy to customize, responsive, uses Markdown, and makes use of SSR.

You can deploy it on Vercel [2] for free and then point it to a custom domain using DNS records in the Vercel "Domains" tab.

[1] https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog#quick...

[2] https://vercel.com/

Hugo, a blog template, and Vercel.

Example: https://mingos.vercel.app/

I host my blog for free on Hashnode https://sergiotapia.com/

How can i host my own blog for free and introduce adds?

If you wanna make sure your blog outlives you, then github pages without custom domains is probably your best bet.

You can use Notion and a tool like https://tail.so to convert your Notion pages into websites with great SEO, built-in analytics and custom design.

you can also solve your seo problem with domain ranking authority service. This article collects the best tools https://ninjareports.com/free-domain-authority-checkers/. This will help you independently cope with the issues of promoting your site using SEO.