Whenever I make a substantial change to the blog, I tend to rebuild it from scratch. What you are looking at now is its ninth rebuild.
I first got into this two years ago. After seeing plenty of recommendations for GoDaddy hosting, I bought a year and followed a tutorial to set up WordPress. That became my first website. Building a site seemed straightforward, but GoDaddy’s Singapore server routed traffic through the United States and was painfully slow. The routing has since become direct. SMTP mail also had problems, so I stopped working on it.
In the second year, I bought a BandwagonHost VPS. I learned to install a control panel and gained more control over my site. Overall, BWH was damn good: despite heavy overselling, it remained very responsive. I mainly bought it for getting around internet restrictions, though, and stopped using it after the IP address was blocked.
This is the third year. I have also tried Vultr and am currently hosting on CFHOST, which I will not comment on further. I have learned a great deal this year and started solving more problems myself.
WordPress taught me a lot, but it gradually became clear that its bulk no longer suited my blog. Many features went unused, and, for familiar reasons, access from mainland China was slow. So I switched to Typecho, a blogging system developed in China.
Just writing.