If you want to go super cheap, Blogger is still free (owned by Google now) and I think they allow a custom CNAME so you can attach it to your domain.
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Wordpress (in the cloud) doesn't require setup, since it's all hosted for you. There are a bunch of big commercial vendors that 100% manage it for you, OR if you want some control, there are also some lower-level abstractions (i.e. like 70% managed instead of 100%):
- https://www.cloudways.com/ is a dashboard + daemon on top of Wordpress that manages its day to day for you, but you deploy it to any cloud VM you want (AWS, DigitalOcean, etc.) So you still control the underlying instance and can drop down to it if you really want to, as opposed to the commercial Wordpress hosts that never give you shell access etc.
- https://gridpane.com/ is a similar self-hosted abstraction over Wordpress, as in they let you manage your own Wordpress "fleet" easily but on your own cloud or servers.
- You can also just run & host the normal Wordpress installer on something like nearlyfreespeech.net, which would be nearly free unless you get a lot of visitors. The setup process isn't really that bad (just takes like 3-4 min); it's the ongoing maintenance and updates and security flaws and changing UIs etc that's a real ongoing pain in the butt. Wix and Squarespace are much simpler.
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Personally I wouldn't suggest wasting time on this, though. Just pay Wix $10/mo or find some other cheap blogging service, or use the free Blogger or a Google Site or such. You just need to be able to connect it to a subdomain, but otherwise it's not going to be worth your time or money trying to manually integrate it into Next. For a big enterprise, sure, but if it's just and your friend writing a few posts... there are much simpler out of the box solutions than rolling your own.
