There is a small twist to my hosting. I host my blog alongside a number of other apps I have built with DigitalOcean's managed Kubernetes offering. Not for everyone but I like it.
You can use a Dropbox folder or a Git repository, have full control of the styling of your blog, things automatically sync and work, etc. I've found it worth the price, which I don't even notice.
See https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph-zero to see how it works.
I mainly refactored a few huge PHP files into many files having "one function per file" and added statistics.
What attracted me to HTMLy instead of Wordpress was the capability to understand the code base and provide modifications as I feel needed.
I did try to add comments to pages, but was not satisfied with what I wrote.
I use to use wordpress, but I did not want to deal with all the updates etc. One of my wordpress sites did get hacked at one point, probably due to a third party template.
The one thing I wish I had a little more control over would be the placement of new articles on the front page.
But I'm not convinced Hugo is the answer for me yet, and might settle on Pelican.
Hosted on google app engine which is cheap as, it serves static files quickly while making it easy to add server-side logic where needed.
As well as a CMS you'd also need to run jekyll to build the posts into html. You could use github to do all this actually: their web interface can work as a basic CMS that lets you edit and commit individual files, and if you host on github pages they'll build the posts with jekyll after each commit.
I'm old school.