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 :)