Blog or website

I am starting a christian blog. I am currently using a free website and I have not posted my blog site yet. I don't like it because it seems like it is very restricted. Even if were to pay the fee to have more access to some helpful tools it doesn't seem like it will be enough or quite what I am looking for. I really don't want to pay a monthly fee for a website but I don't want to have a generic site either. Something has to give. I would like to be able to view on the homepage how many people have visited the site, I would like to allow people to be able to follow me from the site, and I would like to allow people to be able to post comments on the site under each blog and also have another general comments section. I would like to be able to hide posts when I am working on them, add links and hyperlinks etc. That is my list for now, this may expand.