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Comment by scalesolved | Hacker News Reader

I used to self host Ghost on Digital Ocean and then switched over to their hosted offering.

I'm really happy I went with them, the culture and idea behind the company appeals to me and the lack of bells and whistles is made up for in a really simple and fun to use editing experience. At least in my opinion it far outshines Medium.

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If I might ask, why did you switch? (I self host on DO as well).

Was there a benefit to switching?

I should also ask: how much traffic were you getting?

I got bored of having to do backups and upgrade versions etc. Also the fact that you can self host at no cost from them made me want to pay them, I like supporting companies and ideas like this.

The benefit to switching was really less maintenance and I could concentrate on writing and to invest in the future of Ghost, win/win!

My traffic is pretty low, no hits on HN yet! :) Quick glance at Google Analytics seems I hit about 1.5-2k visitors a month.

As a followup: what were you paying on Digital Ocean?

(I know it seems like a small deal to talk about $5 or $25 for your main blog with over 1000 monthly visitors, but a lot of people experiment with dozens of little content ideas.)

It would have been the smallest droplet at the time so I think $5. I switched to hosted Ghost July 2015 and haven't looked back.

I'd consider self hosting again if I was planning on running lots of different domain/content ideas :)

Thanks so much for being a customer! :) And for those who have asked similar things about the Pro service, and why it's expensive compared to a VPS, ^ this is one of the most common reasons we get. Lots of developers start out self-hosting and then decide they'd actually rather be coding other things than maintaining their blog.

The other main difference is that Ghost(Pro) is a managed service. CDN, WAF, Backups, Security, downtime recovery, threat management, etc - are all included. TLDR you sleep easy at night while we stay awake.

Of course, these things will be of different value to everyone - depending on your situation. We actively encourage people to self-host when that's the best setup for them (which is often!) but for many, having a reliable PaaS is the best of both worlds.

It's also a great way of funding the future development of the open source software that you're using, of course. But that's a whole other thing :)

Thanks for providing a great platform John :)

By day I program so the last thing I want to do when writing down my thoughts and ideas is maintain all of the above that you listed!

Have you considered increasing the number of views on each plan? Charging for everything else is certainly reasonable, but as I mentioned before, a single popular post can easily exceed the base plan and force you onto the Team plan at $80/mo.

Have you considered something like cloudron.io? They automate backups and upgrades etc across all apps and not just Ghost.

Nope but it looks cool :)

For now I'm happy to give my $$ for hosted Ghost as you've gotta vote with your wallet!

I had the exact same sequence, moving from a self hosted DO install to their hosted option.

The editing experience is what sold me, even when they had very few other features. They had been a bit slow about features currently since they are spending a lot of time making under-the-hood changes but I think it has a bright future.

Totally fair comment. We are (slowly but surely) coming to the end of the cycle now as we work toward releasing version 1.0. Things will definitely speed up again after that

I went in the other direction because their personal plan went from $5 (IIRC) to $20. I have a $5 droplet hosting it and the only difference is that I have to restart Ghost nightly or it will eventually seize up.

Honestly I don't know why I'm using it though. I probably should be using Jekyl or something like that.

I tried self-hosting Ghost for a few months, then decided I couldn't live with some of the lacks (at the time, you could not reasonably put it anywhere but at the docroot of a domain). It took me about a day to switch to Pelican, and I do recommend that in particular and static generation in general.

Figuring out what kind of workflow you want is crucial. A few additions to the Pelican makefile made things much smoother for me.

Did you try adding a swap partition? I'm using the ghost image from digital ocean on a 5$ instance and even when I set it up manually before I didn't have the problem you described.

I didn't, but I'm not sure my constitution will withstand setting up a swap partition for a system that could be replaced by make and a trivial HTTP server.

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