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Comment by startupdiscuss | Hacker News Reader

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!

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