Managed Hosting with Synaps Media

Marketplace
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Hello Ghost community!

I’m Murat, a software engineer and entrepreneur based in the Netherlands. Today, I’m excited to introduce Synaps Media, a managed hosting service crafted exclusively for Ghost. Sharing this publicly for the first time here means a lot to me because I deeply value the insights and support of the Ghost community.

What is Synaps Media?

Synaps Media (synapsmedia.com) is a fully managed hosting solution designed to make Ghost simpler and more accessible for creators, freelancers, and agencies. Here’s a quick look at what we currently offer:

• Pricing: €4/month (€48/year) with 14-day free trial.

• Generous features: No hard limits on content, visitors or members (except for 2,000 newsletter emails per month). Also includes Custom Themes.

• All-inclusive: Built-in CDN, SSL, automatic updates, and daily backups.

I consider our current plan a special “Early Adopter” deal. While features and pricing may evolve in the future as the service grows, I am committed to honoring this plan—at its current price and features—for as long as subscribers remain on it. This is my way of saying thank you to those who join us early and help shape Synaps Media.

Key Features That Set Us Apart

Synaps Media is designed to simplify Ghost hosting for everyone—from individuals with no technical background to freelancers and agencies managing multiple sites.

• Simple Hosting for Non-Technical Users: My goal is to make creating a Ghost website as easy and intuitive as setting up a social media account. To achieve this, Synaps Media is building additional features—like seamless domain management and email servers—that will make owning and managing a website hassle-free for individuals.

• Multi-Site Management for Professionals: For freelancers and agencies, Synaps Media offers the ability to create and manage multiple websites under a single account with a central management panel. This streamlines the workflow for those who deploy sites frequently, and I’m exploring exclusive features and deals to further support multi-site users.

Whether you’re a solo creator or someone managing multiple projects, Synaps Media is designed to remove the technical barriers and make publishing with Ghost accessible and straightforward.

A Word of Appreciation

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible work being done by other managed Ghost hosting providers, including the official Ghost(Pro) and great service of Jannis with Magic Pages. They’ve made Ghost more accessible to creators worldwide, and I have deep respect for their contributions. I have inspired a lot from their work. I believe multiple hosting options benefit the Ghost ecosystem, and Synaps Media aims to add value in its own way.

Join Us on This Journey

Since private launch in Spring 2024, Synaps Media has grown to host over 30 Ghost publications. I’ve learned a lot from these early adopters, and their feedback has been invaluable in shaping the service. Now we have a small team (me as full-time and 2 part-time supporters) and a good infrastructure with the capacity of handling hundreds of websites easily.

If you’re looking for a hosting solution that’s affordable, flexible, and creator-friendly, I’d love for you to give Synaps Media a try. With a 14-day free trial, you can explore all the features and see if it’s the right fit for you.

I’m always open to feedback and suggestions from this community. Your input is invaluable in helping Synaps Media grow and serve creators better.

Thank you for taking the time to read this announcement. I’m excited for Synaps Media to contribute to the Ghost ecosystem and provide a reliable option for creators. Check out synapsmedia.com to learn more, or feel free to reach out with any questions!

Warm regards,
Murat

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Hayırlı olsun, başarılar.

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I am using this service and it works quite well, with fast updates, and also (for now the year is less than 50 euros).

Moreover, in case I need it, customer service is very efficient and quick.

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Hello all,

I want to share an update about Synaps Media. Today we introduced full-site backups that includes complete copy of the Ghost DB and content folder. We were working hard on this since 3 weeks, and I believe you’ll like the outcome.

I think, this will be beneficial for many people who want to get the complete data they have, play with them, or using for development purposes, like cloning the website in a development environment.

For more information, please check the documentation

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image2406×1518 249 KB

What does that backup include?

  • A full dump of the Ghost MySQL Database (taken with mysqldump)
  • A full copy of the content folder that includes upload images, files, themes and settings.

Is it a paid feature?

No, it’s included with the current Starter Plan, for all of website owners on Synaps Media. Even you can use it while you are in free trial.

Our roadmap

We’re actively working on several exciting updates, which we plan to roll out in the coming weeks. You can expect announcements on:

  • Enhanced tools for migrating to Ghost.
  • Advanced Ghost configuration options.
  • Custom sending domains.
  • New themes.
  • New plans for expanded newsletter distribution.
  • An affiliate program.

Looking forward to sharing more soon!

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I wanted to share some updates since Synaps Media has rolled out multiple improvements since my last message here. In short:

  • You can now buy extra Newsletter Credits to go beyond the 2,000 emails/month limit.
  • The Pintura Image Editor is now included in all Ghost sites.
  • You can now configure Custom Sending Domains directly in the Synaps Media panel.
  • A new Domain Manager lets you add DNS records for domains managed by Synaps Media.

Here are the details:

:open_mailbox_with_raised_flag: Newsletter Credits

By default, Synaps Media includes 2,000 newsletter emails per month with your paid plan. If you need more, you can now purchase additional credits:

  • €5 for 10,000 emails
  • €45 for 100,000 emails

A few nice things about how credits work:

  • Credits are valid for up to 1 year
  • They can be used across multiple Ghost sites you host on Synaps Media
  • Your included 2,000 emails are used first every month
  • You can stack credits by purchasing as many packs as you like

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Check out the help article for more details.

:framed_picture: Pintura Image Editor

Since April, every Synaps Media site has access to built-in image editing directly within Ghost Admin, thanks to the integration of Pintura Image Editor.

Crop, rotate, adjust—no need to leave your browser.

Read the announcement post to learn more.

:envelope: Custom Sending Domains

Previously available only by contacting support, Custom Sending Domains are now self-service!

If your domain is managed through Synaps Media (i.e., you’ve pointed your nameservers to us), setup is fully automated. Just pick the domain you want, and the rest is handled in the background—your sender address will be ready in minutes.

It took a lot of effort to get this just right, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. :sparkles:

:globe_with_meridians: Domain Manager Β

If you’re using Synaps Media DNS for your custom domain, you can now add and manage your own DNS records with the new Domain Manager, directly from the panel.

This is great for:

  • Adding MX records for incoming mail
  • Verifying your domain with third-party services
  • Setting up custom integrations that require DNS validation

It’s currently in beta, but already quite solid. Based on feedback and some UI polish, it should be marked as stable soon.

:rocket: What’s Next?

In our recent customer survey, the most requested feature was Custom Sending Domains—done :white_check_mark:

The second most requested? Ghost’s Social Web integration .

I’ve already started working on it! You can expect an announcement very soon.

If you’re using any of these new features, I’d love to hear how they’re working for you.

As always, feel free to reach out or reply here with questions or thoughts. More updates coming soon :rocket:

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Just a quick heads up! Social Web arrived at Synaps Media as well. We are extending the network!

Also I added some Ghost configuration settings to Synaps Media panel. Read today’s announcement for the details.

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I don’t want to be late to the party. Of course we are in for Ghost 6.0! :slight_smile:

Please welcome Ghost 6.0!

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I want to share an update. Starting from today, everyone has 10% discount for the their 2nd or more websites hosted on Synaps Media! This is a great deal for creators managing multiple projects, agencies/freelancers serving clients, businesses with different brand sites or just for helping family and friends to have their own Ghost blog.

Please have a look our announcement post for the details:

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I recently purchased the services of Synaps Media and can confirm that it is an excellent service. Everything works perfectly, and the chat support is outstanding. Managing the domain directly from the platform is extremely useful.

I’m super satisfied!

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Today I announced a new program of Synaps Media to support Ghost Theme developers by hosting their demos free-of-charge.

I believe theme developers are an important element of the Ghost ecosystem, and providing a managed hosting to them for their demos, can give more time and energy to focus on their theme development, instead of maintenance of many demo instances.

I already had contact with some theme developers and we started with ThemeX this week. I would like to publicly share from community forum as well that, I’m open to host theme demos of other Ghost theme developers too. If you are working on Ghost themes and would like to use Synaps Media to publish your demo, please contact with me.

Here is the full announcement post:

I’ll do my best to continue to invest on Ghost ecosystem!

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Congrats on this, really great initiative. Would love to have our Ekto Themes demos on Synaps Media.

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Today I announce subdirectory install feature for Synaps Media. Here are some highlights:

  • You can easily run multiple Ghost sites under same domain without any technical task. Just enable it with a button on the panel.
  • Our 10% multi-site discount fits perfectly for creating subdirectory installs.
  • Newsletter credits are shared between connected sites under the same domain.
  • This feature is available without extra cost.

You can read the full announcement here:

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This is really interesting, @muratcorlu ! For the multi-site option (ghost within Ghost, or two sibling Ghosts at /en and /fr, I’m interested to hear more about how you’re handling newsletters and memberships. Does each Ghost have its own separate sign-ups? Or how does that work?

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Hi Cathy. They are completely separate instances. So nothing special about membership or newsletters. Separate signups, separate newsletters, separate ghost admins.

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Can a user be logged into two at once, or are there cookie conflicts? :)

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Added the Synaps option to my list here:

… although I’m not convinced that multiple Ghost installs is the right solution, despite being the official one. :) [Not a ding on your work - the ability to have multiple ghosts in subdirectories without having to set up a proxy is awesome. I just think that for many sites a single install would be better, if we could just get a little bit more multi-language support into core.]

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Thanks for the mention.

I agree with you. If would be better to have native solutions inside Ghost to have multilingual sites. But this is a requested feature from my publishers multiple times.

And yes, according to my tests same user can login to sites running root path and subdirectory at the same time, by registering and signing in.

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Cool. I thought maybe there’d be some overwriting of cookies. :slight_smile:

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You were right. I just realized that, signing in on both sites are indeed possible, but switching between the Ghost instances causes to log out from previous site, for member logins. So if you login on mysite.com/es/ and go to root path, then you logout from /es site. That’s not the case for Ghost Admins, since they properly write cookies with respected paths. But member cookies are always written for root path, even if Ghost runs under a subdirectory.

I consider this a bug and created a PR on Ghost. Hopefully Ghost team will take a look at it. In the meantime I’m working on patching this fix on Synaps Media sites.

EDIT: Applied that patch on Synaps Media, and it worked. But even with this fix, there is still a missing thing: If member logs in in root path, then switches to a subdir site (while not logged in on that subdir site), member cookie of root path will be tried to read by subdir Ghost, then will delete the signature cookie, which will cause sign out on root path site again. Fixing this a little challenging because of some details below.

Details

In members-ssr.js line 146

const value = cookies.get(this.sessionCookieName, {signed: true});

This triggers, inside cookies@0.9.1/index.js line 103–107:

index = this.keys.index(data, remote)  // signature check

if (index < 0) {
    this.set(sigName, null, {path: "/", signed: false })  // ← write, inside a read

So cookies.get({signed: true}) internally calls this.set() when the signature doesn’t match. That internal set() is NOT using sessionCookieOptions — it’s using its own hardcoded {path: "/"}. Ghost’s _removeSessionCookie and every explicit cookies.set() in members-ssr.js do use sessionCookieOptions correctly. The problem is that this one implicit set() inside the library bypasses all of that.

So the sequence when a root-site member visits /tr/:

  1. members-ssr.js:146 — cookies.get('ghost-members-ssr', {signed: true})
  2. Library finds the cookie value, checks its signature against /tr/ Ghost’s key → mismatch
  3. Library internally calls cookies.set('ghost-members-ssr.sig', null, {path: "/"}) — this is inside the library, not in Ghost code
  4. Set-Cookie: ghost-members-ssr.sig=; Max-Age=0; Path=/ goes out in the response
  5. Browser deletes ghost-members-ssr.sig at Path=/ — the root site’s signature cookie is gone
  6. Root site’s ghost-members-ssr value cookie still exists but is now unsigned/unvalidatable
  7. Next visit to root → get({signed: true}) finds no .sig → throws → member is logged out

So I’m not sure if we should accept this for now, by assuming switching between languages after signing in on a language will not be a regular visitor flow.

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For the record: This PR is merged and released with v6.36. Starting from this version, member session cookies are scoped with subdirectory. An important fix for running multiple Ghost instances under the same hostname.

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