Congratulations. A big win for Internet decentralization! (It's not sarcasm, I'm all in for having your own space on the Internet).
I invite you to try Grav CMS[0], it's what I use for my personal blog[1].
Grav is a flat-file CMS, it doesn't use RDBMS. It's highly performant. I also have CloudFlare in front of it, but it was already faster than the typical WordPress you see elsewhere.
Grav also adheres to the latest PHP version, so you don't have to carry along legacy syntax around like other CMSes. Its error pages are comprehensive and the stack traces are actually readable.
I personally think it's the best out there technically speaking, the best of both worlds (Flat-file and at the same time, dynamic instead of compiling the build every new post), the only drawback is that its plugin ecosystem it's still in the early stages, so if you're to create marketing landing pages or similar, you'll still fall short there.
It's supposed to work just by extracting the .zip or .tar into the 'public_html' directory. At least that was my experience, I run it from the cheapest cPanel shared hosting I could find (the ones of $3/month). My cPanel shared hosting provider also provides me with SSH access, and I got used to it as well.
I could have gone with the VPS route, but the typical cPanel hosting come with sensible defaults that just works like it's supposed to.
What I did was to download one of these skeletons (prefilled with data) and start from there. It's almost 99.9% guaranteed to work that way.
The Admin plugin helps a lot to reduce that obscurity you mention.
Full disclosure: I'm not a PHP developer as well, I know nothing from it, I only know Python, some C++11 onwards and Delphi.
Wow, that's a blast from the past. Great to see Grav still going, and still lead by Andy Miller.
Andy Miller was the founding design lead for Joomla! CMS. He also started the first template/theme shop and club long before there was anything like it in the CMS world.
I invite you to try Grav CMS[0], it's what I use for my personal blog[1].
Grav is a flat-file CMS, it doesn't use RDBMS. It's highly performant. I also have CloudFlare in front of it, but it was already faster than the typical WordPress you see elsewhere.
Grav also adheres to the latest PHP version, so you don't have to carry along legacy syntax around like other CMSes. Its error pages are comprehensive and the stack traces are actually readable.
I personally think it's the best out there technically speaking, the best of both worlds (Flat-file and at the same time, dynamic instead of compiling the build every new post), the only drawback is that its plugin ecosystem it's still in the early stages, so if you're to create marketing landing pages or similar, you'll still fall short there.
[0] https://getgrav.org [1] https://www.ivanmontilla.com
EDIT: Typos.