Hi everyone, I’m new to the forum and I just made myself an account to share some thoughts. I’m really considering Ghost but some things are holding me back to give it a try.
The first thing is: I am doubting to host Ghost myself or take a plan. The plans are not really flexible. In my case we are considering leaving Drupal as a online blog / magazine. We have a team of 15-20 members, but never get more than 50k views per month. This means I would need to take the Business plan ($200/m), just to get to 15 staff members, which is even not enough yet for our team. But we would only use like 5% of the pageviews. If there was a plan like 25 staff members but only 100k pageviews, this would suit better in our situation.
Secondly: it’s damn hard to just try Ghost. The only way is to give your credit card info, something I’m really suspicious about. Not that I’m not trusting the people behind Ghost, but with current trends of hacking, dataleaks ect… I’m really not considering giving my credit card info, just to test a product. Can it be so difficult to just setup a dummy demo to showcase functionalities of Ghost?
I don’t know what to tell you about the credit card info. Personally, I use credit cards specifically because they are so willing to refund fraudulent charges in the event of a data breach. Additionally, if you do a Ghost trial, and end up purchasing a plan, won’t you be at the same risk of having your credit card info stolen?
Perhaps you could try something like a Digital Ocean one-click virtual server? They are quite quick for setting up, testing, and starting over as needed. I’m not sure if you need to enter credit card information for that trial.
Ghost can be downloaded on Ghost: The #1 open source headless Node.js CMS and run locally with exactly 2 commands, it’s not hard to test. If you are’t a developer and you don’t want to deal with code to test something, then there’s a no obligation 14 day free trial where you can spin up a new instance with about 3 clicks.
Yes we validate credit cards up front, without charging them, to make sure people are actually legitimate. After having 10,000 porn blogs created every single day when trials were open, this was a pretty easy decision.
So it’s all pretty straightforward. Either run the install process yourself, or validate a card for a free trial.
If you don’t want to do either of those, then that’s your choice - and in that case it’s almost certainly not the right product for you anyway.
