I personally started with a hand-rolled static html site and some content. When I decided to self-host, I got a super cheap VPS and just ran the site off of Node.js with an nginx reverse proxy.
After around 10 blog posts, I just wrote my own static site generator: https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-sta...
Most importantly, what works for me is just writing in HTML. It is more expressive than markdown and the browser preview _just works_ (including displaying images and/or running inlined js if certain posts require it)!