I highly recommend going with hosting your own WordPress. The setup is painless and allows you to quickly get your blog up and running. There are tons of themes to choose from that you can use as a foundation to get the appearance you desire. The plugin system also works great and allows you to easily add various features to your blog.
I have used WordPress for a non-technical blog for over 3 years now without any issues. I've also been thinking about starting a technical blog and have been looking into using Drupal for it.
If you're hosting your own WordPress (or any other solution, actually), you really should be keeping an eye for any updates. WP is a popular hacker target, even waiting a day after an announcement can be enough to get hacked. Thanks to Muprhy's law, such an announcement will definitely come when you're on vacation somewhere.
That's, of course, assuming that such an announcement is made in the first place. Last year the timthumb bug was being exploited and not all theme download sites bothered to alert the users that the themes were vulnerable.
Definitely. If you log in to your WP blog at least once a day, it informs you about any updates and lets you apply the update with the click of a button.
Ah, I remember reading about the timthumb bug at work and checking right away when I got home if my site was vulnerable to it (which it wasn't).
No problem, I have mine on shared hosting at HostGator [http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml]. I'm currently using the Business Plan since I need the SSL for another site I run, but their Baby Plan is plenty good at $10/month. Plus, it always helps to have your own web server available in case you want to host any other sites.
I have used WordPress for a non-technical blog for over 3 years now without any issues. I've also been thinking about starting a technical blog and have been looking into using Drupal for it.