There seems to be a lot of microblogging going around, but I want a place to put my writings that are much bigger. I know that having my own website is also an option, but I’m finding filtering ethical hosting providers and website builders to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, and I’m afraid that even if I find them, it’s going to be too expensive.
Not as a hosting service, no. But at wordpress.org you can download the software and install it on any web server. A lot of web hosting companies offer a 1-click process of setting up wordpress on their servers, too.