Kinda old-ish thread, but since I made my own website last month, I figured I'd jump in too
I used Wordpress with the ComicPress theme to make my website. Thought it would be much harder... but it actually took me less than 24 hours to set the whole thing up granted, it's also true that I have a certain degree of experience in graphic & web design and that I've been running (free) Wordpress blogs for well over a decade, so there's that. The reason why I picked independent Wordpress hosting and not a paid plan on Wordpress.com was mainly one: I wanted to be able to put ads from ComicAd on my website and the only Wordpress.com plan that supports them... is the "Business" plan, which costs $300 a year -__-
The hardest part for me was figuring out which hosting service I should use. Every tutorial I checked would usually recommend BlueHost, buuuut... tbh, it looked like it required a bit too much commitment from me (the least expensive plans also require you to pay for 2 years of service in advance, before you even get to build your website), and like a lot of the features it offered weren't even things I cared about. Low cost hosting services, on the other hand, seemed a bit too bare bones. Eventually, I settled on a local "managed" hosting service: for less than $100 a year (but the first year costed me half than that), they take care of site backups, Wordpress updates, SSL certificate updates and a whole bunch of other neat things. In this way, all I really have to worry about is uploading my pages I roughly followed this guide to make my own site, as well as a few others (one thing that doesn't get mentioned in the guide I linked is the Whois protection... it's an additional privacy option you'll have to add to your hosting plan when you choose it. Costs about $2 a year and can be pretty vital to prevent doxxing, stalking and similar crap).