Thank you for that info.
Yes, DO is nice. I just hope that it will work better now after I fixed swap memory thingies. Time will tell. I do think, in that article, that they exaggerate the self-hosting costs. It can be as cheap as $5 including backups and everything else needed, not minimally $100 
. Very good information though, if you wanna self host.
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Yes, I have fixed swap memory thing, I wrote that in my original post. I have no idea if this will help, because I’ll most likely find a cheap VPS somewhere and try installing ghost on that. If I have to pay for DO droplet with 2GB memory, It will cost me at least $10 and then it sort of loses it’s purpose of having a droplet on DO.
Well, with Ghost the droplets on DO still make sense because it’s one of the few VMs with some kind of “support” for Ghost. I wouldn’t suggest you other stuff to self-host Ghost. It might a bit expensive, but it works very well and there is the possibility to add also many website in the same droplet…
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There’s nothing unique with DO necessary to host Ghost albeit they do have a prebuilt image. There are many other service providers that fully support hosting Ghost.
The requirements are documented here:
And build instructions here:
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Thank you @block and @mjw for the info.
I’ve decided to try out a VPS at Hetzner. Yesterday I tried to install Ghost, but it fails after downloading the latest version and then I’ve gotten the famous “ghost directory not recognized” message. I will try again today, because I don’t know what I’ve missed that has made this happen. I hope it will work.
Either way, the current DO installation seems to work fine after the swap thing, so that’s good. I don’t think my blog will have a huge following. None of my readers have so far signed up to become members, even for free so we’ll see how it goes. I’m just happy to be able to write blog posts and having people reading them.
Thanks again for your help and input.
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On that topic, I currently self host with 1-click droplet but I would like to ask another question : how hard is it to self host with Docker in comparison with 1-click droplets ? What are the pro and con of Docker when hosting various Ghost blogs ?
Well, I’m already having an issue with Docker. I posted my topic issue this morning:
Have you tried 1 click Droplet before to compare ?
No. I’m keeping it as cheap as possible by hosting it on one of my servers on my home LAN. True (more challenging) Self-Hosting.
on what machine do you host Docker ?
I host 3 Ghost blogs and Matomo on the smallest Linode size… or at least I did. It started freezing and crashing nearly daily once I added the third blog. Upgrading to the next size up fixed that.
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I use a mixture of AlmaLinux 8 and 9 on my LAN. For my Ghost machine, I deployed my first version of 9. The machines on my LAN, as far as hardware, is a mixture of physical and virtual machines, and a couple of Raspberry Pis.
I wanted to come to this topic to add another important point for the self hosting people out there. Using cloudflare is very important if you are at the low tiers on Digital Ocean, even if you have swap memory currently setup. But unfortunately Cloudflare need some time to be understood because it has many settings to customize. Especially the settings for the Cloudflare cache everything helped me to get a 100/100 score on Gt Metrix quite easily. Here’s the tutorial for wordpress sites, which works also for ghost (just change /wp-admin* with /ghost* in the exclusion) Cloudflare Cache Everything Improves Wordpress TTFB By 90%
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Do you think proxying A records for both root domain and www would help ? I am currently trying to set it up but modifying my Nginx .conf does not work.
If Nginx isn’t configured correctly, proxying via Cloudflare won’t help.
Nonetheless, if you have an issue, please post in Developer help, rather than piggybacking an old thread.
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To setup your cloudflare you don’t need to touch your hosting, but your DNS records… There is a complete guide on cloudflare for how to do that. Then in Page Rules on Cloudflare setup yourdomain/* Browser Cache TTL: an hour, Cache Level: Cache Everything, Edge Cache TTL: 7 days.
You can actually run it on a raspberry pi at home if cost is the issue. You don’t need any fancy command line skills either. Just use yunohost, flash it onto the pi and click the configuration.
But one other very nice way to self host is with pika pods.
You can run it for 2 bucks a month and dial storage, ram and CPU up and down whenever you need
Hi @block , thank you, would you have a link to this complet guide ? The Cloudflare doc is quide big and I am not sure to what you are referring to.
I will create a new topic sorry
I run a Intel NUC at home with Proxmox. I use a Linux Container within Proxmox that holds all of my docker containers that have to do with my website. This includes Cloudflared, Ghost and some databases. I use cloudflare tunnels to handle everything in between so that I don’t have to open any ports.
This isn’t that much different, to me, than using a VPS other than it’s sitting on my desk at my house. Other than the Cloudflare stuff I have absolute full control over everything.
It’s worth learning about self hosting at home if that kind of stuff interests you and Proxmox is pretty easy to use even though it seems a little intimidating at first.
Using a mini PC, I don’t see any difference in my power usage/bill. All I pay for is my $10/yr domain.
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