Have You Seen Ghost

Have you seen Ghost, guvnor? Sweet little publishing platform it is, and to you – cheap at twice the price.

The photo is of a man who was advertising a performance during the Fringe Festival here in Edinburgh last summer. And it seemed kind of appropriate as an intro to this post, given that I am recommending a non-WordPress publishing platform named Ghost.

I started a Ghost blog as an experiment because I wanted to see what I thought of being able to see the front-end finished page as I wrote. I didn’t expect much, but I find to my surprise that I like it a lot.

I could have started the blog on Ghost’s own servers, but the cost is quite high ($19/month) for the cheapest option – and that’s for a blog that is half serious and half an experiment.

Running a site on Ghost’s servers gets you one site, 25,000 page-views per month, unlimited transfer and storage, Automatic updates and backups, Upload any theme or app, Worldwide CDN & security protection, and SSL Support.

So if you have a high-traffic site that is built around text, then it might be a solution for someone.

There are other ways to get a site up and running. You can download the source code and run it on a VPN. It is unlikely you could run it on most shared servers because of the way Ghost is built.

If I had the skills and energy to do it, I could start one on Digital Ocean for a very small monthly cost. But in the end I took the easy and cheap option – £29.00/year for a blog on TSOHost.

Here’s the link to my blog on Ghost: Marginal Seat and here is a link to the About page where I talk about the experience of writing with Ghost.