I've owned staticmethod.net for over a decade now (I think) and have never really used it, but recently I've started thinking that I want a place to write a little more "long form" content than fits on Mastodon.
I've been exploring "self hosting' for a long time now, but I figured for something like a personal blog I wanted it hosted off site, and just want a place to write. I didn't really want to figure out managing the software for this, I've got a lot of other things I'd rather focus on.
This site is run on Ghost, which I've found to be a really simple platform when it comes to writing. I don't know if Ghost is particularly hard to run yourself, but I chose to use PikaPods because they really make it easy.
PikaPods
PikaPods supports a variety of Open Source "self hosted" software, Ghost being just one of them. After signing up, deploying an instance of Ghost is basically a 1-click operation, with options like amount of vCPU/Memory/Disk set up with minimum defaults. It's not completely "non-technical" or off the shelf, but is pretty close and removes a lot of the overhead in hosting it yourself locally.
For Ghost, I needed to configure the ability to send email via environment variables (also pretty easy with PikaPods) and for that I've been using ForwardEmail for a long time.
By default when you deploy an app on PikaPods you get a randomly-generated URL for your new service, but using your own domain is fairly simple. I had to create a CNAME entry in my DNS provider to point the name I wanted at the auto-generated one from PikaPods. Then clicking a button on the settings page for Ghost in PikaPods updated Ghost's configuration with my new URL and restarted the app.
ForwardEmail
ForwardEmail, at its most basic, is a service that takes care for forwarding email on a domain you control to some other address. It's a really easy way to get email set up on your domains and have them all funneled to your main email address.
ForwardEmail also supports SMTP access, so it fits really well when you want to run a couple of apps that need to send emails for limited things like password resets.
Ghost Themes
Open Source Ghost themes are really hard to find, and I wish there were more choices that supported dark themes. There are quite a few paid options though if you want to spend money on it.
For this site I ended up using Attegi and I like that it's simple and dark-themed.