You don't learn to drive a car by sitting in a wagon. You get the car and you learn. Securing a server is not rocket science, and learning how to do so is a worthwhile endeavor.
Get server, set up keyed SSH auth, make sure your web server isn't running things as root, and keep your packages up to date. That's enough for Joe Schmoe to host his cat blog on Ghost.
I deeply loathe articles of the form: "such and such is really hard so don't try it!" Popular topics we should not attempt to learn include threaded programming, security, encryption, network protocols, and VMs.
especially since its a blog..there's relatively little at risk...relatively ok for it to blow up...