Try Ghost, I use it for my blog, has a markdown editor, a beautiful no BS admin UI, seo friendly out of the box
For the self hosted version I use heroku (7$ / month) and this[1] library, remember to hook it up to an AWS bucket though else you'll loose your pics each time the server restarts.
You can host it yourself. Made by former Wordpress people that wanted to narrow the focus to be just about blogging (rather than a huge CMS).