People who are self-hosting Ghost sites, what is your stack?

Developer help
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For example, I have a few sites hosted in separate $5/month droplets on Digital Ocean (using their 1-click app process which is fantastic and so quick to set up). I’m using Route 53 at AWS for DNS and Formspree for contact forms, and I plan to use Discourse for a forum (has SSO with Discourse been integrated yet? I saw a while back that it was on the roadmap) hosted on a separate droplet for the sake of simplicity and in case I screw something up trying to put Ghost and Discourse on the same server.

I’m interested to know what other tools people are using to improve the performance or security of their websites. Does anybody have suggestions or recommendations? I’ve heard people mention Nginx and Cloudfare, for example. How are people using those and is it worth going the extra mile to set that up?

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I’m using Cloudflare for CDN & DNS, DigitalOcean for hosting, plausible for analytics and formbucket for contact forms.

For my theme, I’m using Tailwind and Alpine.

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I’m using an Ubuntu instance hosted on Google Compute Engine (GCE). The Ubuntu instance is running Apache2 and the PageSpeed module. MySQL as DB manager. Images are stored in a Google Bucket using a Ghost Storage Adapter.

I also host 3 other Ghost sites and a couple of other PHP sites (WordPress and Processwire) on the same instance. I had signed up to a committed use contract with Google. It works out to about $22 CDN per month.
I manage the server (Ubuntu updates, Apache directives, log rotations, backups, etc.) with Webmin.

I had tried using the free-tier service offering by Cloudflare but hadn’t noticed any significant service improvement. Also, I prefer keeping my own Let’s Encrypt SSL website certificate.

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Hardware:
droplet on DigitalOcean — 8 GB Memory / 4 AMD vCPUs / 160 GB Disk / FRA1.

Software:
Ghost 4.3.3., SQLite database, nginx as reverse proxy, self-hosted Commento service, modified Alto theme, fslightbox.js.

Additional info:
migrated from self-hosted Wordpress, 600+ posts, 2000+ images, 2000 comments.

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Ubuntu on Digital ocean VPS with NGINX
Cloudflare as proxy and CDN
Tailwind CSS in templates.
Cloudflare workers for contact form handling.
Mailtrap.io for emails handling
Clicky.com as analytics solution

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Hi there! I host everything at home.

Probably not a good idea in my case - I live in Ukraine and power outages happen time to time

Hardware: Fujitsu Futro S920 / 16 GB (2x8) SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 MHz RAM / mSATA SSD 512 GB
Software: Ghost + Proxmox VE + Ubuntu 23.10 + Socat (instead of Nginx) + MySQL + Cloudflare Tunnels

I described all the steps and gathered it to the series of articles. See more details about my setup here:

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