Just thought about it jokingly yesterday that every developer's first blog post is how they set up the blog or how they wrote a blog engine... :)

Long story short: Sign up for Scaleway, get your account approved, launch an instance, they have affordable "learning" instances that still feel "real" and can later run real services that need backend. I don't expect lot of traffic and I don't care if my stuff would go down from time to time, it's for fun. Set up SSH. Buy a domain, set up the DNS records to point to your instance. Run Caddy on the server to serve a dummy HTML file. Set up HTTPS. Verify you see your stuff in the browser. Now, create an actual site. Install hugo, pick a theme, install locally, build locally. Set up a script that copies the build folder onto your server where Caddy is serving, then restart Caddy. Write some content, check the limits of the theme / your set up, make sure everything works correctly. Even with the best of themes, you'll want to fix or change something, do that, if it looks good and you still have energy to work on your blog, start writing posts and let the world know.