An ephemeral Ghost playground service?

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Hey folks, happy Friday :slight_smile:

I’ve been thinking about whether an ephemeral Ghost playground service would be useful. The main motivation is to provide a fast and easy entrance for non-tech-savvy people to start trying out Ghost.

Being ephemeral means:

  • Anyone can get a Ghost instance up-and-running within seconds.
  • That Ghost instance will be only available for a limited time, like a day or two.
  • It will have limited system resources and an ugly domain name, making it good enough for trying out, but not enough for any practical production usage.

Here is a quick mockup of how it’d work:

The whole idea is a direct port of poopy.life ---- my favorite ephemeral sandbox service when I worked on WordPress in the good old days. That’s why I named it goopy.life in the demo above.

From what I know, poopy.life was sunset mainly because it’s extremely hard to fight abuses like creating spamming sites. To be honest, I don’t have any better strategy in mind; just thought it might be an interesting tool for this community.

What do y’all think? Please feel free to share any feedback you might have :person_bowing:

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If I needed a site for a day or two, I’d just spin up a trial on an existing hosting provider. If I needed a couple months, I’d start a pikapod.

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Fundamentally, I think it’s a good idea for complete noobs to give Ghost a try. You would have to figure out how to prevent the inevitable abuse of the service – perhaps a time limit on the existence of the site, and after that you have to start over?

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Great point. Thanks for pitching in :slight_smile:

At first, I thought the advantage of my solution is that it’s going to be a frictionless experience, since it wouldn’t even need signing up. However, it wouldn’t be as good as a real host.

So my positioning is actually questionable. Poopy.life positioned itself as the fastest way to spin up a disposable WP site to mess up. Maybe that’s a better positioning? I should think about that.

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Indeed. That’s why I plan to limit system resource and limit the lifetime. I expect it to be a hard balance that I’d need to adjust along the way, though.

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With the increasing popularity of Synaps Media, I also see many trials with “testing”, “staging-something” or “dhiausda” subdomains, from accounts with anonymous emails. So I think free-trials of managed hosting services are already very popular for just checking things. But trying out some stuff that trials of managed services doesn’t allow, would be helpful. Like changing Ghost configuration file freely, adding custom storages, connecting a custom Mailgun account, or uploading custom themes or using custom integrations (some trials don’t allow those). On the other hand, these are the real risky parts in terms of abusing. So it really needs to be a neat implementation.

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