I'll add my experience as a counterpoint -- I've been running my own wordpress blog for several years now, and the amount of effort involved has been surprisingly high. I've had to tune apache numerous times (seriously, who wants to tune apache in order to write a blog), I have to regularly defend it against malicious traffic, and I've had to manually fix the installation after a plugin installation prevented wordpress from starting. Plus since it's a one-off, I'm not convinced that I could bring it back if anything were to happen to the server it runs on.

For a project blog I used hosted wordpress, and I found that to be a pretty good middle ground. Honestly I can't think of a case where running your own wordpress server is a good use of your time.