I am one of those people who has way too many websites, most of them getting little traffic, but I wanted individual domains and ghost instances with a custom theme for each site. Given these are hobby projects with no income, it was too expensive to professionally host three sites at $25/each for $75 a month. I spun up three $6 droplets at $18 a month. Each time I wanted a new site, it was another droplet. I thought, “what if I purchased a larger droplet, and hosted multiple ghost blogs?” I spent my weekend testing the idea and documented every step to share with the Ghost developer community. I have also included all my tips for optimizing your ghost instance.
Great suggestion Lakshmi! For some, using the digital ocean 1-click ghost install to get started and running the ghost-cli for additional blogs is easier than docker containers. With that said, docker is awesome and if that’s your preferred method then go for it
Thanks so much for sharing your tutorial ajfriesen! I would love to know more about your host “Hetzner Cloud” and the type of hosting package you are using for running multiple applications. Why did you choose Hetzner over other hosts, such as digital ocean or AWS? Also, how are you handling ongoing maintenance such as keeping your server, mysql and ghost instance up-to-date, rotating log files, etc…
Updating everything is already taken care of automatically and I have written down this here:
Backups are done daily. It is a feature you can turn on for your server itself.
Planning on a better system, but time🤷 also it’s good enough. Saved my behind actually twice😅
Disclosure:
I did manage quite a huge infrastructure in AWS in my past job.
And now I am in a company and where we build our own cloud as well.
So, some experience I would say.
So why hetzner?
Best price, easy and reliable.
It’s not rely a hosting package. You just get a virtual server, storage, network etc and setup your Linux system to run whatever you desire.
In our case ghost.
The big 3 (AWS, Google Cloud and Azure) are to expensive and way to complex for 1 server.
You even can get a good free VM from Oracle cloud. The free tier is actually pretty good!
But it’s similar complex as AWS I would say from the first glance.
That is why I don’t shift. Currently everything runs perfectly for less than 10€ a month. Not willing to put in the time for now as well.
Digital ocean is also simple enough IIRC but not hetzner has the better prize. At least for people in Europe.
There is also scaleway which has good prices as well which I used in the past.
Thanks so much for responding ajfreisen and for sharing another awesome article. Now I have to play with watchtower! There is an endless amount of ways to geek out on weekends
I’ve been using Oracle for about two years and I’ve never had any problems with them. And they’ve provided adequate support whenever I’ve needed it. Even in the always free version.
