When I was looking into setting up a site for a poetry blog, I did some googling to see what peoples' opinions were.
On the whole, Wordpress outshone Blogspot in terms of personal reviews and user experiences. The only thing that deterred me was the technical aspects, as several of these reviews cited needing to have servers set up, maximizing bandwidth, the GBs available to utilize pages, and a lot of other computer-tech systems I have no experience with. This seemed to be in regard to high-traffic sites on a professional level, but I didn't know how much that was involved with personal sites. I myself have NOT used Wordpress (.com or .org), so I can't say how accurate any of that information was.
I ended up going with Namecheap(.com) to purchase a domain, and they have an "app" for Easy Wordpress. It comes with a variety of basic templates that can be tweaked and adjusted to suit your needs, with TONS of options for customization, integrating links to social media, even adding advertisements. Setting up with Namecheap took roughly a day, but they walked me through every step of the process, and I managed to get my site up and running in less than 48 hours.
I also manage a site for a friend's collaborative blog, and his was much more convoluted in the set up process. Namecheap sources their domain name options from various sellers, so depending on who you buy the website domain from, you'll get different prices and processes both.
As far as cost goes, it's been reasonably cheap, and I have a .com domain rather than a .org domain. I pay $2.88 a month for the Easy WP app, and $10 a year for the domain. My friend's site is $2.88 for the app, and $2.99 a month for the domain. Compared against $10 a year for the domain and $10 a year for hosting, it sounds a little less cost efficient than the standard WordPress package. The only major difference is that none of the themes are behind a paywall through the Easy WP app. I didn't want to pay for Premium on WordPress, so that freedom of choice lured me to the Easy WP app over the classic WordPress site.
All in all, I'm very happy with the results I've gotten from the Easy WP app and the way my poetry blog turned out. Just some information to chew on while shopping around for the best site to host and set up your own site. I wish you luck!