Installing Ghost CMS alongside / on top of an archived website using shared hosting

Developer help
1

I have a website that was made many years ago, consisting of html pages, many of which are quite complicated (think extensive photo galleries, itineraries, programs etc), that would be extremely onerous to port to a new website.

I want to install ghost on the server and use this to build a new website, but I also want to keep all of the old content available so that I can link back into the old HTML file structure from an ‘archive’ page(s).

As far as I understand it, I can’t simply install ghost into public_html on top of the previous file structure. Instead, I could install ghost into a new folder in the home directory, and make this my document root folder. This would keep the two websites seperate, and would be neat, but would block access to the archived content. Is there a simple way to call files from the older website, which is now behind the document root folder?

Alternatively, I could simply install ghost, and then copy the old file structure into the ghost directory, though this might cause problems?

Is there a more elegant way to do this?

2

You probably can’t install ghost in this hosting environment. Ghost needs Node, and most shared hosting runs on Apache.

If you want to self-host, lots of folks use Digital ocean, or pretty much any virtual server plan will work. Note that those options are unmanaged - you’d be responsible for your own server maintenance and backups. But they’re cheap, and great for learning on.

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3

Thank you. Appreciate the clarification / help.

Would it be feasible to proceed as follows: self-host using a VPS, install Ghost onto the new VPS, and then manually bring across some of the pages/folders/files from the old file structure and put them into the document root directory so that Ghost can hyperlink to them as necessary?

4

Should be doable. They won’t be /editable/ in Ghost, but you should be able to serve them either through Ghost or using nginx (which is typically installed in front of Ghost, and which the Ghost CLI will install for you).

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5

Beautiful. Thank you again for your help, Cathy.