What is the cost for hosting Ghost on AWS or similar?

Developer help Self-hosting
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Hi all,

I’m currently self-hosting Ghost on an AWS EC2 instance. I’m new to the AWS world and I just wanted to ask other users how much is costing them or how I can estimate the expenses for running and hosting Ghost on AWS.

We plan to have multiple staff members to write blogs in our platform although at the moment is just me and someone else. I’m currently on a free EC2 tier that last 12 months. How much can it cost me after the free tier period ends? How can I estimate the cost? Are there better alternatives? Perhaps other AWS products or solutions other than EC2?

Let me know if you would like to know more so I can provide more information. Thanks a lot =)

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DigitalOcean (DO) instances or “droplets” start at $5 per month and with weekly backups (recommended) for an extra 20% or $1.

There’s also newer $6 per month droplets.

I’ve run multiple instances of Ghost on these $5 and $6 droplets without any issues, except when updating an existing site to a newer version of Ghost. Sometimes the system would crash after running out of memory. I added swap files to temporarily increase the available memory whenever necessary and this has since ceased to be an issue.

If you’re running a bigger site, there’s of course bigger instances available as well.

I would recommend DO over AWS and I think the Ghost project team recommends DO in their documentation as well. I use DO in combination with Cloudflare’s CDN and DNS.

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If you are interested in AWS EC2 for Ghost hosting then have a look at Ghost Cloud Hosting, Ghost Installer, Docker Container and VM - I use it for a number of self hosted Ghost websites and it works well. For ultra small Ghost sites you can even manage to organise shared hosting. Here are some notes that I have put together about Ghost hosting with a Bitnami Ghost stack.

https://www.influencer.tips/how-to-organise-and-get-a-bitnami-ghost-instance-started-on-aws-ec2/

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If you’re going to use AWS, I’d look into LightSail - you can get an instance and all the necessary network configuration a lot simpler and easier (and more secure!) than doing everything from scratch. You’ll be in the $20/month range.

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Thank you for the recommendation, sounds like a great service for Ghost. Will I just have to create a Linux instance and follow the Ghost Installation docs in Ubuntu? Or are there more steps involved?

I will also have a look at @DonaldH recommendation that also sounds interesting so thank you!

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You can use the pre-build Bitnami image - it comes with everything you need already installed. You just have to configure a few things and start the service.

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Sorry this post its in spanish, but explains how to set up for a FREE year of Ghost at AWS https://blog.soltekonline.com/crea-tu-propio-blog-de-manera-gratuita-con-ghost-y-amazon-web-services/

I’m struggling now to set up the SSH, so my site its able to serve https, but that’s another problem.

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Thank you! It’s okay I also speak Spanish. The post is very useful, I was actually wondering how to setup Bitnami before with the Free year offered by AWS. What is Bitnami actually used for? Is it just a tool for automated server setups? Sorry I just haven’t heard of Bitnami before until @mattcam mentioned it.

Offtopic, but is there a way to automatically translate Ghost blogs?

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For Bitnami instructions have a look at Generate and Install a Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate for a Bitnami Application

Also, worth a look is https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/learning/ssl/what-is-an-ssl-certificate/

Bitnami is sponsored/owned by VMware - their application catalogue can be found here Bitnami Application Catalog

I do weekly free community digital marketing workshops and would be more than happy to deep dive into doing a Ghost setup with a Bitnami stack. If you are interested RSVP to a workshop here Plans - we can record so it might be helpful to others.