Hosting Ghost
A short guide to running Ghost in a production environment and setting up an independent publication to serve traffic at scale.
Ghost is open source software, and can be installed and maintained relatively easily on just about any VPS hosting provider. Additionally, we run an official PaaS for Ghost called Ghost(Pro), where you can have a fully managed instance set up in a couple of clicks. All revenue from Ghost(Pro) goes toward funding the future development of Ghost itself, so by using our official hosting you’ll also be funding developers to continue to improve the core product for you.
Ghost(Pro) vs Self-hosting
A common question we get from developers is whether they should use our official platform, or host the codebase on their own server independently. Deciding which option is best for you comes with some nuance, so below is a breakdown of the differences to help you decide what will fit your needs best.
| Ghost(Pro) | Self-Hosting | |
|---|---|---|
| 🎛 Product features | Identical | Identical |
| ⚙️ Base hosting cost | From $9/mo | From $10/mo |
| 🌍 Worldwide Fastly CDN | Included | From $50/mo |
| 💌 Email newsletter sending | Included | From $35/mo |
| 📦 Full site backups | Included | From $5/mo |
| 🖼️ Built-in image editor | Included | From $12/mo |
| 💵 Payment processing fees | 0% | 0% |
| 🖥 Install & setup | ✅ | Manual |
| 🔄 Weekly updates | ✅ | Manual |
| 🚧 Server maintenance & updates | ✅ | Manual |
| 🔒 SSL Certificate | ✅ | Manual |
| ⚠️ Threat & uptime management | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🥊 Enterprise-grade security | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🔀 Custom edge routing policies | ❌ | ✅ |
| 👩💻 Direct SSH & DB access | ❌ | ✅ |
| 🔨 Ability to modify core | ❌ | ✅ |
| 🚑 Ghost product support | Forum | |
| ❤️ Where your money goes | New features in Ghost | 3rd party companies |
Which option is best for me?
Self-hosting is the best choice for teams who are comfortable managing servers, databases and Node.js apps who want full control over their environment. There’s more complexity involved, and you have to signup-for and pay for your own Mailgun account (email delivery) and CDN service (performance and scale) — but ultimately more flexibility around exactly how the software runs. For people sending lots of email newsletters, self-hosting generally works out to be more expensive compared to Ghost(Pro), but for people who aren’t using email functionality, it can work out to roughly the same price.
See self-hosting guides & instructions →
Ghost(Pro) is the best choice for most people who are focused on using the Ghost software, and don’t want to spend time managing servers. Setting up a new Ghost site takes around 20 seconds, and after that all weekly updates, backups, security and performance are managed for you. If your site ever goes down, our team gets woken up while you sleep peacefully. In most cases Ghost(Pro) ends up being lower cost than self-hosting once you add up the cost of the different service providers.
See Ghost(Pro) pricing & plans →
TLDR: If you want the easiest, cheapest option: Ghost(Pro) is probably your best bet. If you have a technical team and you want maximum control and flexibility, you’ll get more out of self-hosting.