Ghost Hosting at Magic Pages

Marketplace
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Hi everybody!

While it was mentioned on the forum a few times already, I wanted to take some time to properly introduce the offer of my managed Ghost hoster: Magic Pages.

:link: Link: www.magicpages.co
:money_with_wings: Pricing: starting at $4/month (monthly, yearly, and lifetime plans available)

I started Magic Pages a little over a year ago, testing different setups, optimizing them, and trying to create a full-service managed package.

By now, over 120 Ghost sites are hosted on Magic Pages, with publications ranging from small personal blogs with a few visitors per month to global publications with tens of thousands of emails sent every month.

Why Magic Pages?

Magic Pages is perfect for people starting out with Ghost, who want the full package (managed email, custom themes, great support). Basically, it’s “sign up and blog.”

Magic Pages always includes:

  • At least 2,000 email newsletters per month (10,000 on the Pro plan)
  • Unlimited page views or members
  • All custom integrations available
  • Always up to date – usually, when a new Ghost version is realeased, it’s on Magic Pages within a few hours

Custom themes are available on the Pro plan.

Some questions I usually get asked :point_down:

How is the speed?
Recently, I switched from a static image content delivery network (CDN) based on AWS Cloudfront to a full-page CDN based on BunnyCDN. This is available on both the Starter and Pro plans for now, but will move to only the Pro plan in the future.

With that implemented, the speed is pretty fast :rocket:.

(Some of my “test sites” that are run on this infrastructure, so you can test it yourself: www.magicpages.co, www.jannis.io)

What about support?
I am a one-person show (might sound scary, but I am not the only Ghost hosting out there operating like that – just the only one who openly admits it :smiley:). Despite that, I always want to provide an amazing support experience.

Having worked in customer service for years, talking to new and existing Magic Pages users is one of the things I love doing the most about it. If you have any questions, just hop on the chat on the Magic Pages website or send an email. You usually get a reply within a few minutes during normal Central European working hours :wink:

Tech specs?
Your Ghost websites will run in a managed Docker environment with plenty of extra resources (memory, CPU). From a storage perspective, there is no hard limit on Magic Pages (see here). As long as you don’t abuse your Ghost site as a file hoster, you’ll be fine :wink:

Let me know if you have any more questions :blush:

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Excited for a simple managed version while I grow and adapt, damned at capacity warning.

Since free 14 days are full is there any way to just start on the $4 to not have to wait?

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Unfortunately, there isn’t.

Context for others who might see this in the future: I have closed new registrations because the current server is at capacity – good problem to have, but annoying nevertheless.

I started preparing a new server around a week ago, and also wanted to integrate some small improvements to the infrastructure – but the growth of new trials was quicker than my tests with the new server.

Give it a day or two, and it should be up and running. I’ll let you know here when things are open again @digitalresidue :slight_smile:

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No stress I get as a small business, I just hope those consuming temps buy from you in the end ;)

I’m eagerly waiting. Cheers!

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Good problem to have!

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This one did and I’m very happy with the service from @jannis and performance of my site hosted on MagicPages :grinning:

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Thank you @fatshark, appreciate your support and the constant constructive feedback you send over :blush:

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Just a quick ping – trials are open again :blush:

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So excited to see this! I will switch once my Creator yearly plan wraps up with Ghost Pro hosting.

The lifetime option is a lifesaver!

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I wonder if anyone has tried the MagicPages lifetime option and can share their experience. It certainly seems quite cost effective.

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Just curious on how did ypou solved the overload, I’m open to provide my experience hosting several blogs using self managed kubernetes, maybe it could be useful.

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Do you mean resource overload? That was pretty easy to figure out. Ghost itself doesn’t need many resources – and the databases are all offloaded onto its own database server in the same data center (<1ms ping :tada:)

Now, every deployment has resources allocated – and once the overall limit is getting closer and closer, a new node is provisioned.

All done in the context of this tool and some custom API scripts.

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Still waiting for some lifetime users to chime in (I know some people are around :smiley:), but if you have specific questions, always feel free to send me a DM :blush:

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@ROY … I’m a MagicPages user and subscribed about 6 months ago to the lifetime option (shortly before Jannis introduced the monthly choices). I moved a well-established blog from Wordpress, partly to improve the publishing experience (it did), partly to reduce the management headaches (it did - see below) and partly to introduce a subscription option. I’ve just passed 200 paid subscribers in the first 3 months.

@jannis provides excellent support.

Some of the migration from wordpress had to be done manually as there were ~1Gb of graphics files. All went smoothly. Since then there has been one cache issue which was quickly resolved (a few posts lacked images - these were picked up in a routine lychee check I run and @jannis solved the problem within an hour or so). Uptime has been very good at >99.7% over 3 months, with the few outages resolved quickly, and recent changes (that I don’t understand!) have improved reliability. Email is handled by Amazon SES and I’ve had no issues. I send about 10-11k per month and pay a few dollars extra when I exceed the 10k monthly limit. I need to purge my “subscribers but not readers” …

The user experience has been very positive. I get fewer comments now (a consequence of the newsletter format), but sign-ups - paid and free - are going well.

A recent glitch that coincided with the CrowdStrike thing involved late night emails between Jannis and me. In the end the situation resolved itself, but I was reassured that the issue was outside MagicPages and that there was help available if it hadn’t been.

As a writer who wants to write, not manage plugins or sort out the CDN, Ghost on MagicPages delivers what I want.

I’m a happy camper and it is certainly cost effective :smiley:

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Lots of things have happend, since I initially posted here about Magic Pages :eyes:

In the last couple of weeks, two things were released that I wanted to share, since these were highly requested and have a big impact on what you can do with your Ghost site on Magic Pages.

Custom Configuration Values

Managed hosting always means that you give a little bit of control away, so somebody else can well…manage it. For Ghost specifically, that usually means that the configuration files aren’t editable. For some pro users, quite a downside compared to self-hosting, where you have full control.

Now, from a hoster’s perspective, that is with good reason, sometimes. Managed hosting always means scale and standardisation. But, there are some configuration values that might differ strongly from site to site.

And tada - these can now be edited on Magic Pages:

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Of course, not everything can be edited. But, some pretty important settings can. Specifically the following fields in Ghost’s configuration:

My personal highlight are the options for comments, portal, and search. If you’ve ever run a PageSpeed test on your Ghost site, you probably saw that some of the issues there are file requests to JsDelivr. By using these configuration options, you can simply download the files from JsDelivr, drop them into the configuration editor at Magic Pages, and host them in your Ghost site’s content folder.

Full-site backups

Another new feature, that is already live for a few weeks, are full-site backups. Ghost has an export/import option, but this is not a representation of the database itself. At the same time, it does not include backups of your content folder, where images, files, themes, etc. are stored.

If you’re self-hosting, you can easily get these backups, but for people on managed hosting, these usually involved an email or chat message to support. Personally, I got a couple of requests per week on Magic Pages.
Not too many, but enough to automate this to offer a self-service option:

Every day around 12am UTC, Magic Pages runs backups on both your content folder and the MySQL database. With this new feature you can download this with a few clicks.

At the same time, you can also request new backups on the fly, in case you published an important post and want to make sure that’s included in the backup.

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The backup feature is already being used by my customers on a daily basis. I am personally looking forward to seeing the custom configurations being explored. And if you have feedback on these features – no matter whether you are hosting on Magic Pages or not – I’d love to hear from you!

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Can state everything with your hosting has been amazing and anyone looking for hosting should cruise by!

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Super happy to hear that :blush:

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I just wanted to add that I have been with Jannis at MagicPages and he has been absolutely amazing!!! He took the time during the transition to answer all my queries and has been very prompt with his replies.

I cannot recommend MagicPages enough :slight_smile:

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Nice inclusion of the image optimization option. Although far from being a biggie, and it’s far outweighed by everything else, that’s the one thing I miss from self-hosting (as I prefer to optimise the images myself).

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Indeed! I basically went through all configuration options and just evaluated whether there was a reason not to make it customizable. Some were more tricky than others, but there’s clearly no downside of letting users disable it :smiley:

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