In a few words: as simply as possible.
Actually, I don't use a Content Management System. I compose my content directly as HTML in the site's source. This has a few advantages:
The main disadvantage is that writing raw HTML directly into my source code repository is a clunkier, more technical workflow than writing markdown into a textbox in a CMS. So far, that tradeoff is to my liking. Perhaps someday I'll add more complexity to my process to give myself a better user experience.
It turns out these questions have the same answer: SourceHut.
In a nutshell, SourceHut is Github
but with better performance and stronger ethics.
I use git.sr.ht to host the repository,
srht.site to serve the pages, and
builds.sr.ht to connect the two.
Since my repo contains the actual HTML pages, my Continuous Deployment setup is essentially just "zip up the repo and send it to the server." In fact, you can see it yourself here! That file, with its special name, tells SourceHut to deploy my site every time I push a commit. That's all there is to it - since my repository is public, I didn't even need to set up any secrets.
The hardest part of acquiring a domain was choosing the domain. This one echoes The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-known software development book I (mostly) liked. The opinions I'm mostly like to write about here are ones I hold passionately. And there's a nice alliteration.
It turned out that passionatepragmatism.com was taken,
but the .blog Top-Level-Domain was not.
It's more appropriate for me anyway;
I'm not making any money from this blog.
Having made the choice,
it was easy enough to purchase the domain.
I ended up using Name.com,
and it was fairly hassle-free.
Since passionatepragmatism.blog is relatively long and hard to type,
it was also pretty cheap -
about the cost of a nice dinner, to hold the name for a year.