Why do you use paid domains for personal blogs?

I host my personal blog on https://www.mcherm.com because to me it's worth a few dollars every few years for domain registration plus a few cents a month (I don't get much traffic) for AWS hosting in order to make it clear that the site is fully owned by me and not be dependent on someone else (like medium) who may have their own agenda.

Self-hosted is really cheap. So I guess it IS the proficiency signaling and the independence... but for me, those are well worth the cost.

I once had (and was happy with) a blog at blogs.mit.edu. Then MIT shut that whole server down, and all of the blogs there were destroyed.

I later started a free blog at Posterous. Posterous was bought by Twitter. The content was moved (free of charge) to Posthaven, while the original Posterous site was taken down.

Posthaven appears to have good intentions of being reasonably priced and available indefinitely, but even so, after having already lost some blogs to the whims of organizations outside my control, I think having my own domain name and my own hosting is worthwhile.

If you own your domain, you have the option of choosing any hosing you want. If you don't you are hold hostage to the platform you choose. That is not the feeling of control, that is the actual control.

10 usd/year is a rounding error. Get your own domain or get screwed over.

You mean vs

   nobody.substack.com
   tool.medium.com

?

Hosting and domain registration are separate things. You can own a personal domain name (a few dollars a year) but use that for hosting pages for free on any number of sites. GitHub allows custom domains on GitHub Pages, for example. Or WordPress.com. You can add a custom domain to GMail too. Or you can pay a few dollars a month for a cloud web server and host your own site.

there are free domain registration and/or hosting providers?

free as in....what's the catch?