Something which my blog experiment turned up is how hosted services seem to *hate* it if you have lots of links.
Frankly, if I was going to write something relatively shorter, I could just do it with social media. Anyway, I'll continue looking into it.
Self-hosted is winning out so far.
In addition, when looking into it, there were a lot of questions to be had about whether the customer service on such services are any good.
Typically, hosted services tend to take customers for granted, and both charge customers excessively, and provide sub-standard customer service.
By the way, "sub-standard" is still giving them far too much credit. You might send off a query, or request, and no one will ever bother to get back to you (not even an automated message).
Further, hosted services don't seem to work that well with VPNs (or going by what I've seen so far), and I don't want anyone to encounter difficulties in accessing the blog.