There are many approaches to this, but it costs me roughly $25 a year to renew my .com domain and pay for my $1 a month vps. Im using an open source cms and pay nothing for fonts because I don't monetize my blog (thus can use any of the non-commercial liscensed fonts).

I could use a more robust platform or a vps host which claims better uptime, or even find a cheaper tld for my domaim, but this works fine for me.

Pay for the domain, yes.

The rest is optional, with good free choices up and down the stack - we're blessed with almost infinite options, paid and free.

It's not easy to have your own little corner online - but it's not hard either. And it doesn't have to cost.

For discovery I really love Bubbles (https://bubbles.town) & they even have RSS feeds.

I pay $0 each for my websites beyond the domain names. Cloudflare CDN + GitHub pages. For my newer sites I don't even bother with a static site generator, LLMs make writing straight HTML/CSS/a little vanilla javascript super easy. If you use webp/jpegxl for images your bandwidth costs are so low and cacheable you easily fit into free tiers.

Publii + Github pages works quite well for writing/CMS/hosting IME.

I feel like this is the author's cost when it comes to personal blogging, especially when mentioning paid typefaces.

The only thing I'd say anyone needs for blogging specifically is a domain name, but that's more to do with the nature of blogging where the author "owns" the space where the writing lives. When it comes to that there are enough free services that can provide you with the space and subdomain.

There's a weird phenomenon I've been noticing in the last two years-ish where a lot of people have become obsessed with blogging and sharing their thoughts online in their own personal digital space. I've even seen old personal blogs gain a surge of activity in the last year whereas in the years prior there would be at most a post per year.

Also regarding the point about text editors I've never understood why people use dedicated markdown editors? I thought the whole point of Markdown was minimal formatting that's hassle-free to write in whichever text box you happen to find yourself in making dedicated software kinda redundant, no? As opposed to something like Org where you rely on org-mode in Emacs otherwise GOOD LUCK when editing it "by hand".

I apologize if this comes off as a rant, I've actually enjoyed this particular post!