Here's how we made this blog:
- We registered the domain with Google domains for $12/year
- The actual software powering this blog is called Ghost which is open source and free.
- We host the blog a 'micro' Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance server. Since we don't expect too much traffic and it's a small server, we qualify for 750 'free' hours. Then we prepaid for the rest of the year via a reserved instance. You can also pay $10/month to have the Ghost company host your blog for you.
- We host our images on Amazon's S3 service. We also use CloudFlare CDN's free tier to cache them around the world. This makes our blog a lot faster to load and saves ~75% of the bandwidth from hitting the images on S3.
- The default theme, which we use, looks quite similar to Medium.com's approach. There are a bunch of other themes you can use too. We made modifications to add the map at the bottom using BatchGeo, updated the nav & bottom bars, and changed the home page design with the help of Bootstrap to show pictures from all of our posts.
We're happy to answer questions: just email us :)