4+ years on Ghost & Digital Ocean

I moved from Wordpress to Ghost & Digital Ocean 4+ years ago. I was tired of the Wordpress bloat and wanted first-class support for Markdown and code-oriented blog posts.

(Ironically code is one of the rarest topics I post about anymore, but I love having the option handy. Also, Markdown even for general purpose is lovely.)

At first I opted for a Ghost Pro, aka, Ghost-managed instance, because I didn't want to put much effort into maintaining my personal site. I did enough coding at work.

But then the price at some point increased a lot and I was mad. So I switched to a self-managed path with a cheap, developer-friendly provider, Digital Ocean. I have a Basic Plan that costs me about $6/month. Looking at my post from 4 years ago, that price has stayed relatively stable, creeping up by a few dimes at most so far. I'm impressed and pleased.

The hardest part of self-managing my site is maintaining upgrades with Ghost and the UI theme (official, my fork). I don't have to do this often – I just did it today when I saw my website had broken (??). It looks like the last time I did a backup was in 2024, likely related to UI theme updates... and the last time I upgraded Ghost core was in 2022 to 5.9.1. ❗A few major upgrades in the past were hairy as they involved MySQL, other upgrades, and navigating memory issues.

I'm glad this past major upgrade (to 6.43.1) + theme fixing wasn't that painful. I also realize how much I miss this rush of code tinkering since I became a manager. I find opportunities every few weeks at work, which is nice. I also still try to code review something at least once or twice a week.

$ ghost version

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Ghost-CLI version: 1.29.3
Ghost version: 6.43.1 (at /var/www/jasname)
admin-jasna@ghost-s-1vcpu-1gb-nyc1-01:/var/www/jasname$ ghost check-update

Love open source? We’re hiring JavaScript Engineers to work on Ghost full-time.
https://careers.ghost.org


Current version: 6.43.1
Latest version: 6.43.1
You're up to date!

All in all, I'm generally pleased with my experience with Ghost and Digital Ocean. I have no plans to change. Grateful Ghost is still open source, and Digital Ocean hasn't changed their pricing for me so far. There may be a point where I will have to increase my storage, and then my monthly pay will be double ($12/month). But maybe instead I'll purge some old docs. 🤷‍♀️ We'll cross that bridge when we get there.