So, now I have no where to go. I decided to leave my favourite editor, my favourite support system (both Ghost and this forum) in favour of the unknown.
All this cause it is not possible to try and create income of the Google ads on the lowest tier of the Pro version. Kind of sad really cause I suspect I am not the only one who may be out of a job and actually struggle to scrape together the 110USD it would cost me to keep running the site
Anyway, I just wanted to share and thank for the awesome support during my year with Ghost. I will miss the Ghost editor a lot.
Hey @Cowgirl , definitely try the link Vikas gave you above. The user who needed it just confirmed he’s got it working. Maybe that’ll give you what you need to stay on Ghost Pro.
I’m a huge fan of Ghost Pro (especially because it supports the Ghost core team), but they’re also not the only option. There’s DigitalPress, which is free-but-runs-ads-on-your-site. If your goal on getting ads working was to just break even on hosting, you could host there and break even. (If your goal is to make money on ads, you might want to look at how much traffic that would actually take - it’s hard!!) I don’t work for them, and haven’t used them, so I can’t say anything about quality, but they might be worth a look.
There’s also the cheap but you have to be your own system administrator options, like Digital Oceal, Pikapods, or getting a low end VPS plan. These can be done for less than Ghost Pro’s starter plan and give you total control of your Ghost site, but they also give you total responsibility for your site and the whole server it’s on. If something crashes, you’re going to be the one who has to fix it. If you have to hire help a couple times a year because you don’t have those skills, you can quickly be at the point where it would have been cheaper to get managed hosting.
I would never ever even consider running a website that tags along with ads that someone else is benefitting from. That is part of the whole point of hosting ones own website whether cloud hosted or not.
I paid one year upfront for my Ghost pro hosting not realising the issues with the ad sense until it was too late. This also made me not working my subscription the way I initially intended to do.
For years leading up to Covid, when my original business basically flatlined and died, the income from ad sense and ads from other platforms on our store window paid for our web hosting. Which is kind of a smooth ride for any small business owner who already pay a shit load of money for other cloud hosted solutions to be able to run - and now trying to pick up - what is left of the business after the pandemic.
If I could get my Ghost Pro subscription paid by using ad sense it would have been a no brainer to stay on and work on those newsletter campaigns that I never committed to after realising the downfall of it all, and ironically also not having the time to do so before getting unemployed.
I see other people struggling with the exact same thing so for sure it is not only me trying to not spend money who have issues with the non existent possibility of the robot.txt file on our tier.
Still, I love the Ghost editor and the themes that come along with it, but for now it is not for me leaving me stuck with sad solutions like Substack or similar.
As @Cathy_Sarisky said, I am on the Ghost Pro Starter Plan, and I managed, thanks to her advice, to have the Adsense ads.txt file validated.
You just have to host the ads.txt file elsewhere (in my case, I did it on a free FTP space of my domain name provider) and have it validated via the Ghost redirection file.
27 days ago I quite my pro subscription, today I started a new one. Technically I should save my money but I tried Substack (what a waste of time, and money if paying for ones own domain) and I tried Patreon. Neither one could deliver what I wanted for this project which is a newsletter for a new podcast. So now I am back on Ghost and will send out free newsletter and hope that will help grow the podcast. Fingers crossed
Wahoo! Welcome back! I’ve been so happy with my Ghost site. It’s different from other platforms but once you get the hang of it the benefits are amazing.
My SEO is off the hook. Lightning fast. It just takes time to realize all the benefits.
Great news, I never doubted the product just the finances after being out of work for a long time. Ghost is by far the best editor I ever worked with, and the newsletters look amazing out of the box.
I was never completely happy with my newsletters on either Campaign Monitor (+6 years as a user) nor its cheaper replacement MailChimp (around 3 years as a user) leading up to my business finally being killed off during year two of the pandemic.
In the between time during the 27 days of cancelling my Ghost, I even tried to set up a Wordpress site, and pretty fast realised why I left Wordpress in the first place after some 14 years being an avid user.
I just wish the robot.txt file wasn’t an issue on the lowest Ghost Pro tier and it would be a smooth sail
Not sure what happened there, it’s possible the forum software had cached a preview for that link in a different language? I clicked the “Rebuild HTML” button and they’re back in English now
I clicked the “Rebuild HTML” button and they’re back in English now 
