I wanted to bring to your attention a new Ghost hosting service at www.digitalpress.blog
DigitalPress offers free and paid Ghost blog hosting.
The free plan is supported by ads and provides 1GB image storage with a couple free themes out of the box.
All blogs include custom integrations - you can enable e.g. Disqus or Google Analytics just by configuring Disqus or GA ID. No coding is required.
Technically
The blog platform uses Varnish cache
Provides free Let’s Encrypt certificates for all custom domains
Uses a global CDN for images
Runs on multiple servers behind a load balancer to ensure high availability
I’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on the service.
It’s sufficient to configure just one of the three records to set up your custom domain.
Once you create your Ghost blog you will see an option to enable a custom domain. The process will guide you and tell you what value you should use to configure DNS.
The configuration is done on DNS provider side.
We didn’t want to overcomplicate things with the pricing and talk about the amount of compute resources your blog receives in each plan. We have rather hidden it “inside” GBs of storage – the higher the plan, the more resources your blog gets.
I understand it’s not clear and we need to work harder to explain the plans more clearly.
@ceecko I loved digitalpress so far. Before I invest in creating my blog through it, if I ever wanted to stop using digitalpress, can I carry over all my content off digitalpress and start hosting my blog on my own? Or would the existing stuff stay only on digitalpress?
#1: are updates made automatically or do we have to do them ourselves?
Updates are made automatically for you. The update from Ghost 3 to Ghost 4 is manual to make sure your theme is ready for it. It takes 2 clicks to perform an upgrade though.
#2: can we upload our own theme no matter what pricing plan we choose or is that only covered with the Standard pricing plan?
Custom themes are available in the Standard and Premium plans. Other plans don’t provide support for custom themes.
#3: In what way is the site ads driven? Backend? Frontend? Header, footer - what?
The ads are placed in the frontend. They’re on the sides of your content. Currently we use Google AdSense.
#4: what kind of SLA can we expect on the Starter and Standard pricing plan?
There is no specific SLA for the Starter and Standard plans. We strive to provide great experience though. Our historical uptime is 99.9% with these plans though which translates to 8hr downtime in the past year.
#5: is there any type of discount if we pay for a year instead of being billed monthly?
With yearly plans you get 1 month free - you pay for 11 months and get 12 months.
