Anyone here using GCP Free Tier for self-hosting Ghost?

I was wondering if it could work once you put it behind cloudflare cdn, but I don’t know how to monitor performances and if it will go in the paid tier (that mean, digitalocean would be a better option)

@sigul I haven’t used Google Cloud Platform so I don’t know what their free tier is like, but a Ghost instance running on a $5 per month droplet on DigitalOcean (and this link will give you $100 credit to use over 60 days so that easily covers 2 months of the basic droplet, many droplets or some huge droplets if you prefer) runs perfectly well, in my experience, so I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend that option, and of course it works well with Cloudflare’s free tier CDN - something to note is that when you are going through the initial setup process for your Ghost installation, if you have Cloudflare set up as your DNS (which I would recommend also) make sure you have your site “paused” on Cloudflare so that the server can communicate directly with your droplet’s IP address on DO, instead of going via Cloudflare’s servers, which will cause you to encounter some issues. DigitalOcean also has an official Ghost “1-click app” on their marketplace which makes installation a breeze.

If I can be of any assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out.

As an addition, I know you didn’t ask, but I would recommend Fathom for analytics. I’ve started using them recently, and very happy so far. Privacy-friendly, for your users - which I think is important, and much simpler user interface than privacy-unfriendly alternatives like Google Analytics. For me, paying a few dollars per month is well worth it.

I’ve also used Plausible and Simple Analytics (privacy-friendly as well) and had no issues with those either. Both worth taking a look at as well, I think.