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Comment by dataminded | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised(?) that the article doesn't mention Ghost [https://ghost.org/].

Might be because it's ludicrously expensive ($30/mo for the cheapest possible plan), unlike WP, Mediun, or Blogger, which are all free.

There are hundreds of paid site hosts, and none of those are good options if you just want to start a blog, rather than a business.

Not disputing that Ghost is expensive (although it is open source so you can self host) but why are paid options not good if you want to blog? You do know that the hosting firm has to spend money to support the service and that paying probably gives you a lot more control over your site?

The hosting is expensive, but it's free to self-host.

I'm running my own Ghost instance on an AWS Lightsail host. Ghost is available as a pre-built template for Lightsail and it costs $5/mo for a Lightsail instance.

Yes but the article lists all of the reasons that the alternatives you listed are also bad for bloggers.

If you are hoping to own a piece of the internet you can thrown Ghost on a cheap VPS for $5/month or you can pay someone else to host it for you for $30/month.

You can also take a 'free' option that makes money off your data and audience.

Op here, yes I wanted to mention ghost it was there back of my mind but forgot to add it when I started writing :/

It's insanely expensive (almost $30/mo) with poor customer support (I once asked a simple question about how export worked and got a sarcastic and condescending response from the founder).

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