Website hosting companies tend to need your real name, real address, and real billing info to verify those things are correct. Isnt Medium more private, because you don't need to feed it any of that?

No, if you know where to look. Medium is just awful. There are too many things wrong with Medium that I won't elaborate here, but I'll leave some sources:

• https://tosdr.org/en/service/1003
• https://nomedium.dev/
• https://www.cdevn.com/why-medium-actually-sucks/

The alternatives that I recommend on my comment have decent privacy policies and are not even close as an abuser as Medium is. They are also free software.

Here there are some decent server providers recommendations for self-hosters which require nor your real name or billing address in case anyone is interested.

https://privacy.awiki.org/#hosting

why'd this get downvotes

Recommending Medium and Blogger in a privacy community is terrible advice. It's disappointing that this is actually getting upvoted.

Edit: The other two comments provide actual private recommendations. This comment would be fine outside a privacy community.

have you looked at the community? this is c/privacy and they recommended blogger lol

Because in spite of the question ("private host" as opposed to "privacy friendly host"), people have commented in the context of privacy (probably because of the community we're on); and in that context, the mere mention of github or gitlab is met with downvotes.

IMHO using github or gitlab for that isn't much of a concern privacy wise (at least not more than browsing a website from the companies behind those services), but it surely is when it comes to data integrity (which is a totally separate concern, but people often confuse it with privacy, like they also do with security). I would not trust either service with that.