Managed hosting services reviewed

Using Ghost
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Just wanted to share outcome of my exhaustive search for a good managed hosting provider:

Ghost (Pro) is of course the big, official one and it helps sustain the project…but I found it pretty expensive if I wanted to have my blog on a subdirectory, more than 1k members, etc.

Firepress.org is by far the most comprehensive alternative I found. Offers pretty much all the functions of Ghost Pro for $19 per month. (including CDN).

Some other solutions I considered include Midnight ($15, no CDN) and the new Gloathosting.com. But their feature set is more limited at this time.

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Themeix offers some excellent managed hosting options as well. I’ve used them – they are solid and have super fast servers, and some wonderful Ghost themes:

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Also –

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Thanks, I wasn’t aware of those options…will FastComet take care of server maintenance, updates, etc…or is it more akin to a DIY solution like DigitalOcean? (I’m not a techie, I just want to blog)

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you can try the options of spookey.io . we are releasing it very soon. Let me know if you wish to test drive

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I have used Netlify’s testmysite.io service to test various managed hosting providers for speed…I figure if they don’t take care to optimize their own website, they might not be the best solution for my site.

This has led to some surprising results…many of these hosts run very slow sites.

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Fast Comet takes care of everything, but also provides you with all of the tools you need to DIY if you want to. Lots of flexibility, and great, responsive support. It’s kind of the best of both worlds, IMHO.

They provide a full cPanel with your account so you get email accounts, web-based file manager, and all of the other bells and whistles you can imagine.

But if all you want is a set-it-and-forget-it Ghost blog, you can just use that and ignore the rest, and it’s still dirt cheap and super fast servers.

I wrote a post about my hosting setup on a Ghost site that I have hosted on Fast Comet:

https://ghost-o-matic.com/my-ghost-dev-tools/

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Thanks for sharing

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Thanks for the good words Joseph :upside_down_face: That gave me the will to write a post about our offering after more than a year and half of doing Ghost hosting.

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I actually started with Ghost by fiddling around with Play with Ghost https://play-with-ghost.com/. Nice and useful creation!

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This is so cool :-p

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Thanks for your recommendation :)
We are providing a FREE Theme (Save $39) also with our business, premium, mega hosting plan.

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Here you can get started for free:

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GhostStead is completely free until your site grows.
https://www.ghoststead.com

You can of course use any theme but the default one is based on Bootstrap V5.

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Thanks looks promising, you are definitely addressing a real need (ie using Ghost for its publishing strength and other solutions for a full website)

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For anyone reading this now, this is pretty good for ghost:

Fastcomet is terrible. They will lie and sell you the hosting, ghost will work OK for a small period of time…then you need to update. But you can’t, the shared hosting environment does not meet requirements for the new ghost version, you’re stuck. Fastcomet’s only solution is to move you to another server. IP change? Rank loss. Then of course are the constant 503 errors because ghost is being served from an environment optimised for wordpress, not ghost.

I fully don’t understand how fastcomet has managed to be a popular recommendation but I swear, ghost should purge every mention of it from these forums because it is the absolute worst service for ghost possible. I am sure there are heaps of people googling “ghost hosting” and finding these pages, like I did, and going with fastcomet, like I did, because it’s recommended blindly so much here.

And what’s funny is the person recommending it…your thread history shows most of your issues you’ve posted about here stem from using a litespeed shared host instead of an nginx environment suitable for ghost. Go figure.

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Hello Everyone,

I’d like to present our managed hosting service available at:

I’m eager to hear your opinions. Are there any details or features you think should be included?

Also, I’m curious to know if the pricing being in GBP is a concern for you would you prefer un $ ?

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Hi Pascal, I like your offering for hosting Ghost. specifically, you provide a greater choice in terms of themes compared to Magicpages, Getmidnight and DigitalPress. However, when it comes to the specifics of your offering compared to the latter three, you do not provide the specifics - I may be wrong, but I can’t find it on your site. On their price page, they all specifically state “unlimited members/subscribers”, and on your site, you do not state if you have unlimited members/subscribers. For example: Midnight [DigitalPress] (DigitalPress - Pricing) and MagicPages

QUESTION: 1) Can you tell us if you have unlimited members/subscribers, and if you do, where on your site do you state this specifically? Secondly, can I choose my own Email marketing provider via Zapia? i.e., Behive or MailChimp, etc.

Finally, the only big thing stopping me from paying for Firepress is that you do not have a clear and specific pricing page like GetMidnight or DigitalPress, so I do not know what I’m getting myself into. Moreover, you do not provide a contact form nor provide an email to get in touch with Firepress. Hence, my only option was to subscribe to your newsletter in the hope you may reply,

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I’ve been using Compiled.host for a while now, it’s been quite cheap at $1.99 a month and pretty similar in terms of a comparison with features from other providers.

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compiled.host

Just this error code on a toast when you try to create a new plan, no explanations.