I would suggest Octopress/Jekyll framework to serve static web pages from a VPS such as DigitalOcean/linode. You may as well use Github Pages to host your web pages if that meets your needs.

This will meet many of your needs listed.

Wanted to throw in a second vote for Jekyll. It's pretty easy to setup, and nothings lower-load than straight HTML serving.

I don't think there is a blog that can be described as both "lightweight" and support all of the features you've listed.

I use a PHP framework (li3) in my day job, but the framework that seemed to fit my blogging needs the most was Django, and even that is "heavy" compared to Wordpress, which is already configured and installed for a lot of ISPs.

I get what you're saying about Wordpress. I moved away from it because I wanted the ability to fine tune the look of the blog and not be stuck with their database structure.

However, the best approach, if you're not wanting to learn a whole new framework, would be to find an ISP you're comfortable with that ticks most of those boxes as far as analytics goes. Then use some kind of static blog system to take your text and turn it into HTML. Unless it's super obscure, the language does matter as much if you're using a static system. Just configure it the way you want and post the HTML that it creates from your files. And as long as you've structured the documents well, moving back to a dynamic blogging system later on isn't going to be that tough.

I'll bite. What makes WordPress too heavy in your regard (I'm a huge fan of WordPress my self, so quite biased), is it the way you use it, or the themes you use?

At it's base, WordPress is quite simple, and it's the themes that define what it looks like and feels like to your users. If you are looking for something very simple then there's the simple twenty twelve theme which is very clean. The theme directory on wordpress.org is also full of themes, there's even a plugin that transforms your WordPress into "Ghost" (The same feel and layout).

But I would love to hear back on my original question as well regarding it being heavy.

For me, there is a lot of work setting it up, getting the themes where you want them, then finding one of 100 various plug-in's for SEO or twitter or whatever, and figuring out which is the best, and which has the least security holes.

You are right, at the core, it is simple, but it is time consuming to me. And it falls over under load unless you have a bit of time or money to throw at it, or both.

I like the idea or working in a text editor of my liking, knowing that quote marked in code aren't auto converted to smart quotes, knowing that the raw markdown is raw, and I can move it anywhere.

I am sure you can do all this in Wordpress, I am just looking to remove all that overheard, as starting a blog again is feeling more daunting than ever given my current medical issues. If I can just get it off the ground I will be happy.

But I feel I have to do something, so I want to do something that gets me to my end goal as quick as possible, but allows things to possibly grow without me thinking about what a Varnish, CDN, Cloudfront, etc all are.

WordPress does not fall over under load, poorly configured Apache servers do that. When WP sites fall over in heavy traffic it's because they're on a small VPS or shared host, and Apache was allowed to spawn more processes than there is available memory. They only run into this condition when there's enough traffic that the baseline number of worker processes all get used up and new ones are spawned. It doesn't matter what's running on the server. I have done no special configuration and use no caching whatsoever, and my WordPress blog has been on HN's front page with hundreds of concurrent visits several times.

Eh, Apache is a common culprit, but it is not the only one. WordPress sites with a moderately complicated theme and several plugins can easily crumble under load even with an nginx+PHP-FPM setup. Yes, you can throw more hardware power at it, but that's true with Apache as well. If you're expecting a lot of visitors to a WordPress site, you will generally want to make sure you have a good cache.

You've said WordPress takes too long to set up, so to manage your expectations I'd probably start by claiming nothing will satisfy all your requirements. That said, what about a static blog generator? HTML is uber portable, hosts anywhere, no install, no database, I think most generate from markdown, use any template, SEO is kinda missing but just follow best practices - and you'll be fast which is a benefit there, dashboard/stats is missing, can you make do with something over log files and GA?

You said you think PHP is right for this, but why do you need that much power?

You are in analysis paralysis. There will be no perfect solution. If you think WordPress is heavy, you never really had serious requirements for content management anyway. My suggestion? Stick with what you know.

To be fair to biturd, the less you're willing to trust Wordpress defaults, the more hassle it is. Once you get to the point of writing a child theme and writing your own code to enforce an html whitelist (as I do) and setting secure defaults in the config file etc. then you're basically swimming against the current of Wordpress' own practicality. You might as well just pick up slim + twig + phpass and roll your own, and it would probably be more secure anyway.

Although I do wonder, if there isn't a good static blogging solution in PHP, why there isn't.

It sounds like you want Jekyll, but in PHP.

I actually starting building just that, it was called LiME (https://github.com/mattbearman/lime) - although I'd never actually used Jekyll at the time, I just knew the theory behind it.

Not long after I pushed v0.2 I switched to Ruby/Rails, stopped working in PHP, and LiME has sat stagnant ever since.

Still, it worked fine, although didn't have all the features of Jekyll, I'd love for someone to take it over.

WordPress is not heavy when you use one of the many caching plugins.

SQLite should not be your go-to database if you want to handle "a few hundred thousand uniques a day". PostgreSQL or MySQL are much better for that purpose.

While some of the core WordPress code is terrible, WordPress is still pretty much the leader when it comes to usability and time-to-market. My recommendation: WordPress plus a caching plugin.

I site with the static blog generator crowd. I've not heard of anything that would meet all of your requirements but my favourite static blog generator, Pelican, would come pretty close.

http://blog.getpelican.com/

I don't see what the deals with not using WP is. Its proven, reliable, fairly secure, simple to install, and easy to extend via plug-ins. Who cares if it has some crappy PHP in it? It works, and gets the job done right.