Today's news just removed that option again. Internet is dividing further. Either you overpay for the convenience or self-host the whole stack yourself. Second one, backed by a static page generator looks more and more enticing now.
Looks like I'll continue building that page via Jekyll on the same hardware. Probably automating the "generate-publish" cycle a bit with some little CI/CD pipeline and calling it a day is a safe bet.
I chose Wordpress.com because (despite the fact that security people make fun of Wordpress) it’s full-featured and could handle my usage for about $100/yr. Now it’ll apparently be $180, which is an annoying surprise price increase. But the real annoyance is 100,000 visits per month for the paid plan: I’ve had months that easily blow past this limit (due to HN hugs) and I genuinely don’t know what will happen to the site if this happens in the future. That limit is extremely problematic and makes me wonder if the company is entering a terminal decline.
Edit: I see the CEO has posted elsewhere to address this -- "Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying."