Ask HN: What are the best practices for self hosted blogging?

I've decided to start tech oriented blogging, and it seems that, at least for nerds, the pull is towards self hosted non CMS blogs based off Jekyll and such. My question is: what are the best practices for setting up such a thing in terms of:

Hosting: as a vms? Some kind of s3 thing? Docker image?

Maintenance: is it easy? A pain? Are there things to look out for?

Comments: I've heard of disqus, but an wary of them controlling the content. Are there alternatives or better ways?

Themes: a big draw of WordPress is the themes. Is there similar for non CMS blogs?

Media: do these style of blogs elegantly handle embedded media such as video and images?

SEO: what are the best practices for long term SEO specifically dealing with self hosted blogs?

Other considerations?