Hi All! As we’ve already established in another question that I asked, certain aspects of Ghost Pro can only be tested live on the platform instead of on a local server.
So I’m curious, what do folks do when they need to make theme updates that make changes to their paid member experience? Seems to me like this a pretty critical group of subscribers you’d want to keep happy, so what are your procedures? Do you just make changes to the theme for the live site incrementally? Pay for a second test account? Make changes at some weird hour of the day?
I’m just really curious what people who administer Ghost Pro do when updates to a live site are needed. Because it seems like there’s a testing gap here and I’d like to know how people work around it.
A digital ocean droplet is about $5/month. So’s a virtual private server. If you’re at the point where you have paid members, having an inexpensive test site to test on is a good idea. [You could also spin up a free trial on Ghost Pro…] If you’re still at the point where that sort of expense feels like too much, you’re probably still at the point where you test as well as you can without being on live, then push to the platform and quickly test live, being ready to revert if needed.
Funny but true fact: My production site is on a $6/month virtual private server. My demo site (that I’m perpetually changing code on, doing random testing on, experimenting with proxies, checking how some edge case with subscriptions works, etc) is on Ghost Pro. Sounds backwards, but I’m often developing for customers hosted on Ghost Pro, so I like to mimic THEIR site as closely as I can, while my own site can happily hang out on a virtual server, no problem.
I do enjoy DigitalOcean. I host my portfolio site there. Spinning up a DO server could mimic most of what I need to test. I suppose I could blow it up and start over every time I need to do a fresh round of testing. What I’m trying to avoid though is maintaining a server on top of maintaining theme code because I’ve found I don’t always have the bandwith to keep up with the upgrades… So that definitely seems like a good option. Thank you for the suggestion!
Would definitely still love to here what other folks do too if anyone else is lurking and would like to share. 