Hello guys, 1 month ago I started a blog using ghost CMS. it is super clean and easy to use, but I have a few troubles which I would like to fix. If you can help me it will be great.
First of all my blog is a totally non-profit information venture so I cannot pay 5 dollars here, 10 dollars there to get basic stuff like search option, popup option for gdpr, comment option. It seems that Ghost platform is made for people with very deep pockets and exclusive for people who understand coding. That is the thing that I didnāt know before converting from WordPress.
If you know any free and I mean freeā¦ not like a trial or until 1000 visits it is free but later it is 25 dollarsā¦ alternative for search, comments, etc. I will be very gratefulā¦
For now, this is a very painful experience, I hope CMS alone will get these basic things in the future.
Have a nice day and have a great start of a week. Kind regards
Hello, I made a similar discovery! However I also found a few ways to reduce the bill:
Hosting on DigitalOcean where a personal blog fits on a $5 droplet, it did require a few technical skills (using SSH) but that wasnāt too much.
Analytics with GoatCounter (free for personal use), no cookie and no GDPR notice needed.
Comments with Commentbox (free under 100 comments / month)
Thereās some free search tools in the forum (e.g.), or for example I see that the free Liebling theme has search included.
None of these require coding skills by the way, just copying-pasting a bit of code in the ācode injectionā box in your blog settings.
I agree that the apparent simplicity of Ghost is deceiving if you are not a techy person, as I quickly found out that going beyond the basics require either more payments, or technical skills. Iām taking this as an opportunity to re-learn forgotten skills, but itās clearly not for everybody.
Thanks for a reply.
I already use $5 droplet from digital ocean which is really cheap. The search tool looks very good and I think I will start using it.
I donāt like 100comments/month. Because topic which I do is conversational in my area so I think that I will with a little bit of marketing hit that limit very fast.
For comments, if you will have a lot of conversations, it also makes sense to pay a bit for that . Other ones I have found include Talkyard (ā¬2 for 1k replies per month), Hyvor talk (free under 40k pageviews per month), Cove ($5, but only with your Ghost logged-in members I think), Commento ($99/year).
I am the developper behind SearchinGhostEASY. You probably wonāt need my help but just in case, feel free to send me a message if you need a hand.
About the comments services out there, if you are not too conserned about your users data privacy, the best free option is probably Disqus. Easy to setup, no usage limitation.
For the hosting, there is also an even cheaper solution from OVH with a $3.50 per month. OVH is the leading cloud provider in France and the infrastructure is solid so I think it is a good price for a VPS.
And finally, in the analytics fields, I personally tested Matomo. It was OK but there is probably more lightweight solutions.
Hope you will find the right solutions for your needs
@curiousdungbeetle
thank you for your help, it seems that you already crossed the path that I am crossing right now. will check all of these in the future
@gmfmi
Oh, nice to hear that you are part of this forum. I already installed your search option and made it work for me. It is just what I need, lightweight, good looking and simple. Great job for this one! if there is some donation button I would be glad to donate few bucks
Now I am looking at how to convert language so instead of Search it is written (āPretragaā).
Regarding Disqus, I checked it, but it seems that in free plan they have some ads included inside of comments. I am trying to make my blog ads free, so this is not working for me for now. but if I donāt find something better there is big probability that Disqus is a way to go.
Thanks for your time and help.
@mitkomitrovski, thanks! Happy to see that it is useful to people. Great improvment idea, I will create a new option to write what even you want as search text placeholder in the next release.
I did not create a donation/payment button. It is purely free and open-source minded, if people enjoy using what I made, that is the only thing that matters
I see this has been resolved, but in case someone else comes along: Midnight offers Ghost hosting for a lower price than the official Ghost one (starting $15/mo). More expensive than the VPS youāre using, but would be useful to someone without the tech skills.
Personally, Iām using the free Heroku plan with Ghost on Heroku, and keeping my database and images (via WebDAV) on HelioHost. But the final site presented to users is via an SSG (Gatsby) on Netlify. Complicated but free
GoatCounter (not GhostCounter!) is great - very simple and seems to do the job. The Liebling theme is fats, good-looking and simple, the author is very responsive and keeps improving it. It doesnāt have advanced membership features, just sign-up, but thatās enough for me.
Iāve seen people using Github Issues as comments for their JAMStack sites. It probably requires a bit of technical knowledge to handle API requests, but might be worth to give a shot
Yes, I am using Docker for my installation (mostly because it easiest deployment method to me). But if you really want a one-click install, you should probably go for a Digital Ocean droplet (Ghost | DigitalOcean Marketplace 1-Click App) if you do not want to pay for Ghost Pro.
@gmfmi Thanks! Iāll go with OVH I think. Iām building the blog for a friend and he wants a French host so DO is not ok for him, although Iāll use their droplet for a personal project later.
Does docker impact the page load speed or is it ok?
I use OVH - running Debian stable(bullseye), and multiple Ghost instances on the same VPS. Itās not hard to install nginx, certbot, mysql and auto-upgrade. Nodejs and Ghost donāt auto-upgrade - you have to periodically upgrade them - which is easy - (use the npm ānā package for node and the ghost-cli for Ghost).
NGINX config is the main thing people stumble onā¦
Setting up auto-backups is one thing you may need to look into.
You can use soft-links and one copy of Ghost installed for multiple blogs - saves a lot of space
Certbot is useful when you have non-Ghost sites where you want HTTPS
If that is too much - then Docker might be the way to go - just donāt forget backups and remember to upgrade Ghost regularly - 13 releases from v4.25.0 to v4.29.0 so far this month (the first 20 days of December).
. Other ones I have found include 
thank you very much!
