I run my blog on a $25 (not month, overall cost) Raspberry Pi 2[1]. I use Markdown. I (ab-)use S3 for image storage. I use 11ty[2].
It doesn't take a coder to know how to do this. And it doesn't take a lot of time, either. SSL certificates are free, thanks to Let's Encrypt, nginx is an "apt get" away. That's all it takes if you want to blog(!).
If you want e-Commerce or shill your newsletter or whatever else uses blogging backends like WordPress, then $177/year is a steal. If you just want to blog, the weekend with Eleventy and a free copy of Obsidian[3] are cheaper, less hassle, and you keep your data in a format that's not Wordpress' pseudo-XML abomination.
Sure, some can’t be bothered. Yes, some would rather pay a professional who often (notably, not always) would do a better job. True, some things you fully grasp only after years of experience. Still, it’s not that difficult. You don’t need to know how to write an OS or build an ICE from scratch to do an adequate job. People routinely learn to do quite complicated things out of passion and/or necessity even when it’s far disconnected from their primary profession; spend some time with the right sources of information and you’ll be alright.
Right, but you are comparing your setup and its costs to wordpress.com, which is not self-hosted and does not require that understanding.
If you're capable of buying a VPS you're capable of sticking a USB cable and an Ethernet cable into something.
With VPS, you typically must know how to SSH and be able to find your way around the system entirely without a GUI (which could be jarring at first). Personally, when starting out, I was always anxious about messing something up so that it makes the server impossible to boot remotely.
Pi, meanwhile, is just another computer you physically have and can do all the normal things you do with a computer you physically have with. It has some hardware peculiarities, but then it’s also simpler to set up than building your own desktop (which, by the way, is another thing non-engineers routinely do).
However, even after reading your comment, I am not convinced an average guy will understand any of those terms. I've seen this. I've seen many many people struggling to set up a blog. Heck, even I struggled about this back in the day.
I'm not some sysadmin guru either, and mostly just look up tutorials when trying to achieve some goal. E.g. Install better caching system, optimize for ram usage, etc.
But yes, I have been hosting my sites like this for over a decade so for me it feels like second nature. In saying that, I am sure there are other platforms that provide free blog hosting and can be used as alternatives. Sadly, it means you'll lose the WordPress.com subdomain, but also access to their network of bloggers.
I remember in 2012, I started a poetry blog on WordPress.com and in a few months I had 2,000 subscribers - all of whom found me through their discovery feature. It was quite nice.
I have no sysadmin/web experience, but do understand the terminal reasonably well enough from my old job as a SWE.
I currently manage a Wordpress installation on a ridiculously performant [1] $6/mo DigtalOcean droplet without issue.
For me, I struggled a bit with their default Wordpress plugin, but there's this fantastic (also free) droplet called Cyberpanel. It's basically an open-source alternative to CPanel, and offers a graphical frontend for lots of common tasks (domain management, auto-renewing SSL, PHP settings, deployment of WordPress and other sites).
Migrating from my old host was as easy as installing a plugin (All-in-One WP Migration, IIRC) on both the old server and the new DO droplet and then updating the domain records to point to DO.
All in all, maybe a couple of afternoons of screwing around, but absolutely a worthwhile (and economically valuable!) skill to have.
[1] I think I measured something like 1000 page loads per second (with WP Fastest Cache; crapped out at around 30 views/s without!) before CPU hit 100%. There are free stress test sites online that let you do this.