I've started my blog with Aegea Engine initially. Basically it is a PHP server with MySQL db, hosted on VPS. AFAIK, it is closed source. The engine is nice and useful, but I wanted to control everything and also cut the cost down to zero or almost zero. And so my first solution was to use Svelte and to statically generate the blog. It wasn't bad, but Svelte doesn't output raw html, which in turn hurts SEO. And also there's too much stuff for a simple blog. So after some time I've rewritten the blog from scratch. It now basically is a bunch of node scripts which turn markdown text files into pages by using simple handlebars templates. It's so simple and easy now, and I do control everything, and as a bonus I get real HTML pages.