Great question! I’ve been dissatisfied with blogging and site building platforms over the last two decades. The ads, privacy issues, and general limitations are all real concerns.
My site is built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages as a private repository. It’s a custom theme that I built with HTML, CSS, and a bit of Liquid syntax. But there are free themes to chose from as well.
Once set up, the publishing workflow is quick and simple: I write a Markdown file, commit it, and push it. It appears live after a few minutes.
Of course, it’s not the easiest to use, but the complete flexibility is worth the effort for me.