Web CMD Fall 2024

Ghost

https://ghost.org

History

Ghost was founded in April of 2013, with the goal of creating open source tools for journalists and writers globally. Today, they specialize in helping create dozens of different websites, from personal blogs, to large writing and editing team sites. Ghost is a non-profit organization, where all revenue is put back into Ghost for further development, as well as investment into the community.

Requirements

Ghost supports the following stack of applications in order to successfully host a site using Ghost:

• Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04
• MySQL 8.0
• NGINX
• Systemd
• 1 GB of memory for server

Hosted / Self-Hosted

Ghost provides self-hosting options, as well as plans for hosting based on the expected audience of your site. They recommend to self-host if you have people that can comfortably manage servers, databases, and Node.js applications. Ghost(Pro) exists for those that want to explore what Ghost has to offer, and doesn’t care too much about managing servers.

Cost

Pricing can range fairly large with Ghost, as there are four plans with different price points, all with varying features. The base cost of the recommended ‘creator’ plan is $25 a month, with their business plan being $199 a month. These costs can exceed $1000, if not $2000 a month when expecting about 200k+ members present on the site.

User Base

Ghost has had over 100 million installs to date, and even has a nice statistic on the home page that as of now, states that almost 13,000 new sites have used Ghost to start their website.