Hosting: as a vms? Some kind of s3 thing? Docker image?
Maintenance: is it easy? A pain? Are there things to look out for?
Comments: I've heard of disqus, but an wary of them controlling the content. Are there alternatives or better ways?
Themes: a big draw of WordPress is the themes. Is there similar for non CMS blogs?
Media: do these style of blogs elegantly handle embedded media such as video and images?
SEO: what are the best practices for long term SEO specifically dealing with self hosted blogs?
Other considerations?
Maintenance: pretty much zero, that's the point of static pages. https://acme.sh for the TLS cert, and you're good to go.
Comments: use third party tools that are designed for that? such as Twitter, HN, Reddit?
Themes: http://jekyllthemes.org/
Media: depends on your server. Maybe a CDN (cloudflare?) could help. I only publish SVG images on my blog, so ATM this isn't something I looked into.
SEO: I don't care much about that. (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/; https://ssllabs.com; etc.)
Others: accessibility (colors -- my blog sucks in this regard), semantic web, RSS feed