Going all in on Ghost

Technically here. is hosted on Ghost.org at the Creator pro level for a reasonable $300/year. There's no audience here, and I'm not doing this to build one, so $300 for hosting and a domain might not be your thing. I've started and stopped trying to self host Ghost so many times on AWS that it's worth the piece of mind.

I've got at least 2 more sites I want to move to Ghost though, so it's time to get that figured out. I would like to get my personal portfolio site back up to point to the tiny bits of internet I've put something silly on, and I ended my Webflow account (14 minutes before the renewal would have hit!) so it's time to get my software testing resources site back up.

The Options

I've used WordPress for most of my online life but I am over the management aspect of it, and the buying plugins of it, and the is this secure enough worry of it.

There was a sweet spot with the Genesis framework for awhile, and I made plenty of sites for other people in my own lil agency plan on Flywheel, but that ended somewhere in 2017. At this point it hosts 2 sites for my husband and I'm paying too much for that at $100/month.

This is where I need to say I still miss Greymatter, because my preference is always the underdog doomed to disappear too soon.

I liked Webflow and the interactive visual builder made me feel I achieved something, but the pricing got incomprehensible. While I enjoyed interacting with the CMS as a database, the nature of needing to add on a paid thing meant my use case wasn't the priority use case so I would probably be better served elsewhere.

I wrote for work on Medium, but I'm squarely in the information should be free season of grumpiness, so that's a no. I support a few friends with paid subscriptions to their Substacks, but the fact I said it that way makes it a no too. Beehiiv was almost it, and it also has that underdog too pure for this world feel I love, but I shocked myself by not wanting to give up all the control again.

That really only leaves Hugo, Jekyll and Ghost for me for low cognitive overhead and straight up blogging.

All anyone making an engineering blog needs is Hugo and the Congo theme. It's perfect, quick, and looks nice. I didn't want to have to do any extra setup for newsletters, so that's what tipped Ghost.

I wanted to learn it in its perfect state and not drag out the process due to AWS or DigitalOcean, so I paid the $300 and I've been happy and unbothered as I figure this out. Now, time to watch a few more tutorials on Ghost on AWS so I can get my mothballed testing site backup.