Added: it's not really the distasteful stuff that substack users sometimes publish on the platform (I'm not big on guilt by association in that regard). I hate the substack software and the expectation that anything on their domain will be somebody's brain fart behind a paywall.
I have some personal static web pages, no blog per se, but some bloggers use Lemmy to federate comments. That seems like a reasonable approach for static blogs if the content isn't too edgy. If you're worried about long term archiving of the comments, you can always archive them yourself with an automated client behind the scenes.
namecrane.com is a good host for shared web hosting if you don't want to use a VPS and run a HTTPD yourself. It starts at $8 per year (bring your own domain). They support tons of existing blogging engines among other things. It's a spin-off from buyvm.net which some of you might be familiar with.