It probably doesn't matter much either way, but I use vanilla HTML/JS

You don't need some fancy tech. Blogs have been around for 30+ years and function just fine on such old tech. The only new tech you should use is certbot and own your own domain.

Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML.

Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.

You make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

Were each image 1 MB? My rule of thumb is to have smaller pictures in the page and to link to their full size if needs be. If your webpage exceed a ebook in size while not having more features, there’s a wrong decision made somewhere.

> Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

No, you just need a host that doesn't have ridiculously small limits. You can easily find find hosts with limits in hundreds of GB, or TB, or even unmetered. You can find them for free, and you can find them for quite cheap compared to most technologists' incomes.

I’d not use Wordpress personally. Luckily for you, there are plenty of options: https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms

SGML.

Just joking. Sort of. There's apparently a modern tool you can use to transpile SGML to HTML[0], and I'm itching to try it out.

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[0] - https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-tutorial/producing-ht... - yes, it's an NPM package, and yes, you can run it in the browser, but you can also use it on a server, or as a static site generator.

The non-blog parts of my site [1] are in XML and I use xsltproc to generate HTML. It's technically a static-site generator. It works, but my God, is XSLT a verbose (functional) language.

[1] https://www.conman.org/

I loved XSLT. I thought it was the most perfect language ever created. What was I thinking?