The other virtual hosting I use is vultr because I can pay with bitcoin. Being bitcoin-based it is probably going to be a little more wild west and might get blocked although I have not noticed that. Probably also less likely to censor.
I just googled and saw a number of web pages with the titles like "How To Hide The Fact That Your Website Runs On WordPress" They claim Wordpress is very secure, and I would say that relatively speaking there is less secure content management software out there. But the crux of the problem is that Wordpress is written in PHP which a garbage pit of a computer language and most PHP code is messy and unmaintainable and therefore hides security bugs. OTOH the language makes it easy to create dynamic HTML.
So I would look through those tutorials and read the ones that recommend a plug-in to hide wordpress, that hopefully also contains security scripts. Look carefully at all the plug-ins (their web pages) and find one that looks most legitimate. Hiding the fact that your pages are served up by Wordpress will go a long way towards security. The reason is that Wordpress continuously has security vulnerability disclosures. Then everyone rushes out to patch their copy. But you might be busy (like I said, you could spend your whole life applying patches). Then immediately upon disclosure of the vulnerabilities, all the script kiddies on the planet start probing websites to see if they have that vulnerability. Most of the time they probe every website regardless of whether they think it is running wordpress.
On my websites I get dozens of Wordpress and other vulnerability probes every day filling up my logs with useless crap. Mostly they are looking for "admin.php" or some other obviously lame page like that. I send back a reply that I do not use PHP at all so GFY. It doesn't help since there is no human on the other end.
In summary, you will have two problems, the script kiddies testing every single Wordpress vulnerability all day long. That will probably require patching, but also look at turning off every feature you don't use. Look for a "hide-my-wordpress" plugin that turns off features. Second you will be attacked by leftists. I believe hide-my-wordpress techniques will help for that. Those folks vary from script kiddie to semi-elite hacker and you want to obfuscate to thwart them. You can also rename pages you use like "admin" to something else random yourself. That way they can't test the tricks used by known "hide-my-wordpress" plug-ins. Also the hiders should be more than plug-ins, they should include scripts that do the renaming. If you do your own renaming, do it in a shell script so you can reapply after updat\ing Wordpress.
I very much appreciate the detail but I am embarrassed to admit your suggestions are way over my head.
I have used blogger in the past, as well as wordpress.com
The first of course was easy but is owned by google, and I found wordpress.com a royal PITA for a simple neighborhood blog, and if they are going to censor me on political memes, then I’m screwed.
PS - re “installing wordpress opensource”
is the first step for that starting at the “self hosted soluotions” under “Products” here?
https://wordpress.com/com-vs-org/