For website hosting I use Hostgator, whatever hosting site you choose I recommend at least that you hire a plan with CDN and that the site has good customer service.
There are some blogging tools that I used to build the website and that I also use to create content and apply SEO techniques.
First of all, if you are going to build a website on your own, I recommend using the native Gutenberg from WordPress, which is free, of course, because only when you try to build a website will you really know what you will need. Gutenberg has a lot of tools, for example, if you just want to build a blog, you probably won’t even need website builders.
As for website builders now saying only the paid versions, because the free stuff is all bulls#*t, I currently recommend Elementor basically because of the price, but there are others like Beaver Builder and Seed Prod that are also very good. Which is better? It depends on the complexity of your project, which is why I recommend Elementor, for example, for a website like Khan Academy I don’t recommend any of these, but rather Bricks Builder. So is Bricks Builder the best? No, because Bricks Builder is more complex. That’s why building a website with Gutenberg on WordPress is important, you will know what you really need, and I can’t recommend any course because I learned by watching random videos on YouTube and messing around with WordPress tools.
Currently, I use the free version of Content Blocks Builder because that’s all I need, if I needed something more complex I would opt for HTML and CSS codes, and as a last resort Elementor. As I said, its not that hard build a blog with native Gutenberg in WordPress (but it’s not so easy too), so for this blog I don’t use Elementor because I don’t need it.
For SEO tools, I recommend The SEO Framework or Yoast SEO plugins, both are very good. There’s also Rank Math, but I still prefer the other two. I don’t recommend investing money in any SEO plugin, use the free versions, if you want to do something like that, I believe that Semrush or MOZ plans are more effective.
I also recommend Site Kit by Google plugin, it helps a lot with analyzing your website’s metrics. I recommend watching how to install it on YouTube, it’s not that simple.
I highly recommend using the WPS Hide Login plugin, it provides much more security to your website in a very simple way. NOTE: I recommend checking how it works, simply activating it can be a problem.
Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Elementor tools and Hostgator service, so if you purchase their product or service using the links I receive a commission. Of course you would not pay anything extra for this, but it helps me to always bring more content.