There is a middle ground, generate the static site content yourself and then there are plenty of providers who will host your static content for free and even let you use your own domain name. Although I'm not sure why I'm telling you this when the website in your HN "about" already uses Jekyll.
I have a Wordpress.com blog at https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com. I switched there from Blogger. Moving all that content took me most of a summer (part time) even with the Blogger import tooling, and will be much harder if I have to go to some markdown tool. This is made worse due to the fact that my site contains finicky images and formatting and (some) LaTeX math. I know a move to a static site is possible but I absolutely dread having to do this again. The transition cost for existing content (and comments!) is really high.
I chose Wordpress.com because (despite the fact that security people make fun of Wordpress) it’s full-featured and could handle my usage for about $100/yr. Now it’ll apparently be $180, which is an annoying surprise price increase. But the real annoyance is 100,000 visits per month for the paid plan: I’ve had months that easily blow past this limit (due to HN hugs) and I genuinely don’t know what will happen to the site if this happens in the future. That limit is extremely problematic and makes me wonder if the company is entering a terminal decline.
I'm also VERY worried about that. My company was just about to use wordpress.com as well, but this limit is insane if true, and means there's no possible way we could even consider using wordpress.com for our company blog. Like you, I have written blog posts that have exceeded 50K visits for one post, and two such posts would exceed that limit. I've done that several times, and it would be crazy to suddenly have a blog hosting platform block viewing of a blog post that turns out to be super popular. For us, it would be fine if they just charge a little more, rather than blocking viewers. However, the fact that they don't say what they will do is a deal breaker.
Edit: I see the CEO has posted elsewhere to address this -- "Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying."
I feel the same. 100K visits is really not that much, and for the price they're charging... What the fuck? This is seriously making me consider dropping them and rolling out my own thing.
Of course, I already started building my page via Jekyll (and I have the domain and the hardware to host it), but wanted to see if there are any more carefree options, just for fun actually.
Looks like I'll continue building that page via Jekyll on the same hardware. Probably automating the "generate-publish" cycle a bit with some little CI/CD pipeline and calling it a day is a safe bet.
