Ask HN: Thinking of starting my own blogging site

So I know I can go down Wordpress, Medium or something similar. Where I want to go is to if I were to expand it to allowing payments + serving up sizable web pages?

Say a database, domain, back end server app. Something along those lines. What is the best way to spend it on? How much would I likely need to expand to?

Using either

https://njal.la/#home

or

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

Any other large costs I would need to worry about? I dont want to hand it all over to AWS or GC etc