Comparing Ghost Blog hosting providers in details

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Hi, welcome to the TechWeirdo. In this post, I have discussed different hosting options for Ghost Blog cms. I have tried to discuss all the managed, semi-managed, and self-hosted options in detail with little things you need to know and most probably you will miss them during signup. I have also included a price estimator for all managed hosting options so that you know exactly how much you are going to pay for your use cases with each provider.

I have also included some semi-managed and unmanaged options for your convenience. Hosting plans are complex, and my goal is to make it easier and to make a go-to guide regarding Ghost hosting. I hope this guide will help you. Please provide your feedback in the comments below.

This post is very long, and I will keep it long to include all the tiny details. A lot of research went into it, to give you the best advice. I believe that this is my duty as you will be investing your money time and resources based on my advice, so I tried to do my best. I am including a tl;dr but I would recommend you to read the whole post and use the price calculator.

Requirements to be a managed host

While searching Google I noticed almost all of the hosts claim to be managed, but most of them are not fully managed. So here are the requirements for a hosting provider to qualify as a fully managed host

1. Automatic Ghost installation and initial setup are taken care of.
2. Automatic backup, backup download, Software updates, and database management are taken care of.
3. Automated Newsletter email setup and transaction email setup (required for login, signup, etc).
4. Nice to have but not necessary: Automatic CDN setup preferably full site delivery (at least static assets delivery). However, CDN is not necessary for fully managed hosting. Without CDN, the performance is going to be slower with higher usage. You can bring your own CDN always but good CDN costs money (I know Cloudflare is Free and good overall, but have you tested their routing?)

With these requirements in place, hosts that qualify as Fully managed hosts are 1. Ghost Pro, 2. Magicpages, 3. Midnight, 4. Digitalpress, 5. Gloathost and 6. Abstract27.

Hosts like Compiled-dot-host (does not include newsletter emails) and Pikapods (doesn't include emails, or backup) fall under semi-managed hosts. There are many others too with a list below, but they are mostly more expensive.

DigitalOcean and Amazon Lightshell fall under one-click installation, but you have to manage everything after that initial installation. So basically they fall under the self-hosted category. You can also self-host Ghost on any server or a VPS with the Ghost installer or Docker.

The methodology used

If I was going by the features listed on the websites of every host then everyone becomes the best. But digging deep revealed some interesting facts. Many managed hosts like Gloathost and Abstract27 despite charging 19 USD per month and 25 USD per month respectively don't come with a CDN. So here is what I did:

• I checked their sites in detail to find specific restrictions like file upload limits, disk space limits, and whether CDN is included or not. A low file upload limit means you sometimes can not upload videos directly.
• I checked whether the mentioned email limit is for transactional emails, newsletter emails, or both, and it turned out to be a good decision. (You will understand when you read about compiled-host).
• I also checked whether they provide SLA or any uptime guarantee. The point is, you may not need SLA but even if one of their plan supports SLA.
• I also tested the performance of the sites hosted by each provider. Now, Ghost is inherently fast, so you would not notice much difference in the low-use environment (you would notice some, like loading delay for images). The performance contrast was more prominent under load. So I tested global TTFB (time to first byte) from 500 nodes simultaneously for each of them. I used globalping.io (a jsDelivr opensource service) and it loaded the HTML of one page from 500 different probes spread across the globe. It checked many things simultaneously like the quality of the CDN, the type of CDN setup, and whether they will be able to handle a sudden spike effortlessly if your site goes viral. All test results are added below the summary of each host.

My findings about the CDN setup: Some hosts use full-site CDN delivery (which is the best), some of them use static assets delivery only (which is okay) some don't use CDN at all. Not all CDNs are built equal. Fastly, Bunny and Cloudflare Premium (probably enterprise, yes reasons host uses it) were awesome. Free Cloudflare CDN is not that good for low-traffic scenarios (because of 2 reasons, aggressive cache eviction and poor routing), but if set up properly can handle load spikes just fine.

All hosts that use CDN (full site CDNs) also include DDOS mitigations and stuff and handled my 500 req well. Fastly and Cloudflare come with WAF and Bot protection, which is coming by the end of this year(2024) to BunnyCDN too. Hosts that don't use CDNs do not include DDOS protection either. But you can add our own CDN.

Also for comparison, I included my own self-hosted setup, which powers this blog itself.

Before diving deep here is my overall impression: GhostPro, Magicpages was good as expected and absolutely recomended, Digitalpress surprised me, Midnight, Gloathost and Abstract27 was a little disappointing which I will explain below.Compiled does not come with included newsletters, and you need to setup your own mailgun.

The Price calculator for price comparison.

In different scenarios, some host is going to be cheaper than others. To find that easily I built this price calculator. But please read about the host completely below to know all the details. This calculator takes into account the starter and creator plans of Ghost Pro and the Standard plan of Midnight. All other hosts have simpler pricing. Also, I didn't put digitalpress free in this calculator (their free tier offers 200 emails per month)

All hosts come with Unmetered bandwidth and unmetered page views.

List of Managed Hosts

Ghost Pro ( ✅ Recommended )

Ghost Pro is the officially managed Ghost Hosting solution by the Ghost team itself. Ghost software is open-source, the Ghost team primarily funds the development of the software via this service. They are registered in Singapore.

Features

• Fully managed (Installation, Update, Backup, Emails)
• Includes premium CDN from Fastly. Uses full site delivery and the best local and edge cache settings, also they use cache reserve at the edge, so their performance is extremely fast (the fastest managed host).
• Unlimited Newsletter sending.
• Uses member-count-based pricing which has its own advantages and disadvantages.
• Unlimited page views, no bandwidth restrictions.
• The main servers are located in the EU (Probably DigitalOcean Amsterdam).

Pros

• Fastest managed hosting
• Usually expensive, but becomes the cheapest after a certain member counts and if you send a newsletter daily.
• Handled my 500req TTFB test easily, so Will be able to handle massive traffic spikes automatically. (Viral proof).
• Good Support.
• Comes with the Pintura image editor now (in-browser image editor) and will include analytics later (Ghost 6.0). Pintura allows you to edit your images after uploading them, but it is not a huge deal.
• 14 Day free trial so test before you subscribe.

Cons

• Expensive for smaller sites.
• Uses of custom themes, custom mail sending domain, and custom integration require a minimum 31 USD plan.
• The starter plan is limited to 1 team member, 1 premium tier, 1 newsletter, and the Creator plan is limited to 2 team members, 3 newsletters.
• The starter plan is limited to 5MB (file size limit) of file uploads, so sometimes you cannot use full-size, high-resolution images. The creator plan and Team plan are restricted to 100MB and 250MB file uploads, which may sometimes prevent you from uploading videos directly based on your use case. In those scenarios, you may need services like YouTube, Vimeo, Bunny Streams, Cloudflare Streams, etc.
• Uptime SLA and subdirectory install (50 USD extra) (i.e. /blog/) is only available on the Business Plan (minimum 249 USD monthly).

Summary

GhostPro is generally pretty good if you don't fall under the restrictions mentioned in the cons section. And in some scenarios, it may even be cheaper (use the calculator). But in other cases, it gets pretty expensive. Below are their speed test results and pricing info. Overall they get a thumbs up from me 👍🏻.

Magicpages ( ✅ Recommended)

Magicpages is a Fully managed Ghost CMS hosting run by Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki. It is based in Austria. While researching, this turned out to be one of the best and sometimes better alternatives to Ghost Pro. Also, most of their plan and pricing are upfront, cheaper, and well-explained. The guy behind it is also very active on Reddit and Ghost Forum. No, I am not saying good things because I have a referral link to Magicpages. You may not use my link, but if you do, it does benefit TechWeirdo a little (TechWeirdo is otherwise free). And no, that referral program doesn't make any difference in this review (I think you would understand that if you read the whole post).

Features

• Fully managed (Installation, Update, Backup, Emails)
• Included Premium CDN from BunnyCDN. They use full-site CDN delivery (although they are not caching at the edge, they use permacache in different regions which caches your site at many locations permanently). Overall performance is very fast (Ghost Pro is slightly faster).
• Email usage-based pricing, so pricing doesn't depend on the number of members.
• Unlimited page views, no bandwidth restrictions.
• All plans support custom integration, unlimited team(staff) members unlimited pricing tiers.
• Subdirectory installation is available in all plans without any extra cost.
• The main servers are located in the EU (Hetzner Germany).
• 14 Day free trial so test before you subscribe.

Pros

• In most cases, this is the cheaper option by a lot (especially if you want to use a premium theme or modify your theme).
• Unlimited members unlimited team members, unlimited storage (FUP apply, see below)
• If you don't need Custom themes and use your own CDN then the plan starts from 4 USD /month (Starter). Which includes a 128MB file upload, so you can easily upload images and short videos.
• The 12 USD per month plan (Pro) includes the custom theme, CDN 10000 newsletter emails, 1GB file uploads, and 99.9% uptime SLA.
• Extra emails cost 5 USD per 10k, which is the cheapest among all hosts.
• Both the plans handled my 500req TTFB test easily so they should be able to handle traffic spikes.
• You can download daily site backups from the dashboard.
• Support is extremely good (even on Saturday). Actually pretty good review across Reddit and the Ghost forum.

Cons

• Run by one person, but to be honest it would have been a more concerning thing if it was WordPress (WP breaks a lot). Ghost in my experience is more stable. Their uptime is also good (They do offer SLA).
• Custom mailfrom domain (nice to have, not a deal breaker) is in development.

Summary

Magicpages overall is decent, more flexible, and cheaper than Ghost PRO and still comes with good performance and awesome support. They also support the Ghost Foundation monetarily so you would still be supporting the open-source organization. In most cases, Magicpages is cheaper, but in some cases like, if you send a daily newsletter and have a lot of subs then Ghost Pro becomes cheaper. Use the price calculatorplans to plan based on your needs. Overall Magicpages receives a thumbs up from me 👍🏻.

Digitalpress ( ✅Free tier is Good )

Digitalpress is another Fully managed Ghost Hosting. They are based in Slovakia, Europe. They are the only managed host with a free tier (ad-supported)

Features

• Fully managed (Installation, Update, Backup, Emails)
• CDN included (Use premium Cloudflare CDN although only for images and file delivery).
• Email usage-based pricing, so pricing doesn't depend on the number of members.
• All plans support custom integration, unlimited team(staff) members unlimited pricing tiers.
• Unlimited page views, no bandwidth restrictions.
• The main servers are located in the EU (Probably DigitalOcean).
• Offers a free tier so test before subscribing.
• All plans including the free one support subdirectory installation.

Pros

• Free tier actually handled my 500req TTFB test well, which surprised me. It also comes with CDN. Some expensive options did poorly in that.
• Uptime SLA is available for plans above 26 Euro.
• Good performance - successfully served my 500req TTFB test.
• Custom Theme available on plans above 15 euro.
• Granular email pricing (0.70 euro per 1K).

Cons

• They use Cloudflare enterprises CDN (via DigitalOcean spaces) which is encouraging, but they don't use full-site CDN acceleration. This means, that more important static assets like css and js are not using CDN. But their origin server can handle a decent load.
• The CDN uses digitaloceanspace subdomain, which might not be a good idea for SEO.
• File storage is restricted although decent cap, still, it may not sometimes meet your needs. There are also file upload limits (waiting for support's reply).
• Support replied after 2 days, but the follow-up question remained unanswered.

Summary

Overall the performance was good, but if you compare it with some other hosts and the cons don't bother you, they can be a good choice. My opinion is - definitely go for the free tier, and "maybe" regarding the paid tier.

Gloathost ( 🤷🏻 Not Recommended ❌)

Gloathost is a managed ghost blog hosting run by Dan Rowden. One big difference is Gloat hosting is not an automated system and each site is created personally and manually.

Features

• Fully managed (Installation, Update, Backup, Emails).
• Email usage-based pricing, so pricing doesn't depend on the number of members.
• All plans support custom integration, unlimited team(staff) members unlimited pricing tiers.
• Unlimited page views, no bandwidth restrictions.
• The base Plan is 19 USD per month and includes 20K emails. Extra emails are 10 USD per 10K.

Pros

• Supports custom theme
• Multiple server locations are available based on your need in San Francisco, New York, London, Amsterdam, or Singapore.

Cons

• Does not come with a CDN
• No mention of file upload limitations.
• My one previous email and Twitter DM remained unanswered.
• Both a customer site and the main site failed my 500 req TTFB test. So no, your site may not handle traffic spikes properly. Their customer website (featured on the site) even fails 50 req, which is probably a sign of very low-power hardware.

Summary

Although the price is more than other hosts, you are getting fewer features at Gloathost. The load test result was also not that encouraging considering the free digitalpress and the cheap plan of Magicpages outperform it. I am also not confident with their support. So at this point, I would not recommend Gloat. They get a thumbs down from me.

Midnight ( 👎🏻 Not Recommended ❌)

Midnight is a Fully managed Ghost Blog hosting provider based in the UK.

Features

• Fully managed (Installation, Update, Backup, Emails).
• Email usage-based pricing, so pricing doesn't depend on the number of members.
• All plans support custom integration, unlimited team(staff) members, and unlimited pricing tiers.
• Unlimited page views, no bandwidth restrictions.
• CDN included (Use premium Cloudflare CDN although only for images and file delivery). But uses cdn.getmidnight subdomain.

Pros

• All plans support custom theme usage.
• Decent disk allocation. 15 USD, 25 USD, and 65 USD plans have respectively 100 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB file uploads, but still expensive.
• Offers uptime SLA on more expensive plans.
• They are probably okay with hosting uncomfortably controversial sites.

Cons

• File upload size is limited to 100 MB, 500 MB, and 1GB respectively for each pricing tier.
• CDN is not full-site delivery. Although image CDN is good, the CSS and js are not served by CDN.
• Apparently, their enterprise grades server is worse than some free tier offerings. They did manage to pass 500req TTFB but with very high TTFB values indicating possible low-power hardware usage.
• Like digitalpress, their files are also served from cdn.getmidnight subdomain. So that may hurt your site's Image SEO.
• The support question was answered at around 10 hours (which is not good, not too bad either, but should have been better).

Summary

Well, there is nothing much to say. Poorer performance, Overall they will not be my choice to host a Ghost Blog 👎🏻. I recommend avoiding them.

Abstract27

They are a French web agency based in London, UK. According to their site they "set up and host, Ghost open-source websites for bloggers, startups, small businesses, and entrepreneurs." From my initial vibe check, they are primarily a website agency over a host (they do host). They also manage your domains for you, and website creation is manual. So the higher charges.

Features

• Fully managed (Installation, Update, Backup, Emails)
• Unlimited staff, members.
• Although not mentioned but probably supports custom theme, custom integration, etc.
• 2-level pricing 15 USD per month with 6000 emails, and 25 USD per month for 8000 emails.
• Server location Germany.
• Their plans are more appealing to website design than hosting. And towards business and SMEs

Pros

• 25 USD plan includes domain pricing.
• 99.9% uptime guarantee.
• 21-day money-back guarantee.

Cons

• No mention of file upload limits.
• No CDN included.
• No automatic setup.
• No mention of extra emails.
• You must have a domain name for the 15 USD plan. No subdomain is given.
• The 500Req TTFB test result is not encouraging despite the higher price.

Summary

From a purely hosting standpoint, which is the focus of this post, they are not going to be a great option for hosting a blog.

Firepress (Failed Sanity Check ❌ Avoid)

Regarding Firepress they failed the sanity check, and I am not going to recommend them to any one of you for the following reasons.

1. No details About Emails/Newsletters on their site (at least on the pricing page). Without emails 19 USD per month is expensive. Also according to one user (Fatshark) on the Ghost forum, they were unable to handle a 12k monthly email volume (in 2023).
2. Only says 500 per month image uploads, nothing about file size limitations
3. The site says free trial for 21 days, but nothing happens after signing up.
4. Many broken links on site, and there were also 7 days of downtime on their dashboard. And their site says I quote- "Threat & uptime management with an SLA of 99.999%. This represents 26 sec per month or 5m15 per year of potential downtime."
5. Charges extra for exporting backup.
6. Their site says CDN caching by Cloudflare, but their own site doesn't use CDN. And using Cloudflare CDN is super easy, I have a guide on it.
7. Their own website which is actually a Ghost Blog itself failed my 500 Req TTFB test. The performance of the 100 req ttfb test was not great either.

For those above reasons, I am not recommending them. My overall impression is 🙅🏻 👎🏻. And my advice to them is: You are dealing with real customers, taking their money and time, at least try to be a little serious.

That is all the fully managed hosts I can find for Ghost Blog hosting. Now let's discuss some semi-managed hosts.

List of semi-managed hosts

What I consider as semi-managed hosts. Host with which you need to set up some parts yourself before you can start sending email newsletters. Mostly semi-managed options come with automatic site setup, software updates, backups, etc, but lack Transaction or Newsletter email setups and, also most of the times CDNs. That part must be managed by you.

These options are usually cheaper than managed hosting, but with Ghost(due to mailgun) if you are sending 10s of thousands of emails (at around 15k) self-hosting gets more expensive at least than Ghost Pro and Magicpages. (You need to do your own back-off-the-napkin math).

Pikapods

Based in Malta, pikapods is not a dedicated Ghost Hosting platform. They offer Ghost Hosting cheaply. Usually, they host the blog in a docker container

Features

• Installation, Update, and Backup included.
• You can access the volume and database.
• Set your own resources based on your needs.
• Pricing is based on the number of CPU cores, RAM, and Disk space you use.
• No restriction on member count, custom themes, or custom integration.
• Unlimited visitors, unlimited bandwidth.

Pros

• Easy to set up.
• The minimum cost is 1.90 USD/month, although I would recommend 1 core CPU and 1 TB RAM, which will cost you 2.65 USD. The minimum one failed my TTFB test. 2.65 USD one barely passed.
• In-built option for Bunny Storage container.
• You get 5 USD signing credit, for testing it out.
• Available regions are the US and EU.
• The owner is fairly active on Reddit. So support is good for now.

Cons

• Some fairly simple technical knowledge is needed. To set up the transaction SMTP email, mailgun account, and preferably a CDN. I have a detailed guide about Bunny CDN and Cloudflare both attached below. That will give your setup a massive boost.
• Some moderate technical knowledge is needed to download the backup using FTP for backup/ site migration.
• You would need your own proxy setup for subdirectory installation. So in that case going with a VPS makes more sense.

Summary

If you are confident that you can manage your own email setup and CDN (which is a one-time thing tbh) and want to save money then you can definitely go with pikapods. Sometimes you may have reservations about where they are based, but that is a personal choice. Overall they get a thumbs up from me 👍🏻.

Compiled.host

Compiled.host is an Australian Ghost Blog hosting company. They claim to be a Managed Ghost Host, but beautifully try to hide one fact which is they don't include newsletter sending and you need a mailgun account of your own. I initially didn't notice this. Which turned off my mood, to be honest. But they can be useful if your main audience is from Australia, as their server is located there. And no they are not fully managed.

Features

• Installation, Update, and Backup included.
• Transaction emails are included not newsletter (they should mention this in their pricing area, not at FAQ)
• Unlimited members, Unlimited themes, Unlimited visitors, unlimited bandwidth.
• File storage and upload size is limited.

Pros

• It comes with free Cloudflare CDN with full site delivery. Which should make your site handle sudden traffic spikes. (They are probably using the Cloudflare Pro plan.)
• Customer support replied quickly.
• They did pass my 500req TTFB test.

Cons

• Does not include newsletter emails.
• Very low file upload sizes ( 10 MB, 25MB, and 50MB respectively for 2.99, 3.99, and 9.99 USD plans). Not suited for video posting.
• No uptime guarantee.
• Australian server, so great for Australian sites, but slower performance in North America and especially Europe.

Summary

Overall the pricing is okay, At first glance it seemed to be the cheapest, but after exploring a bit, my impression is they are cheaper because of obvious reasons and not the best. Also, I would ask them to do two things. 1. Say that "newsletter not included" in the pricing box itself, and 2. Don't say "your site is replicated with Cloudflare CDN", say "cached" instead. Replication usually means it is stored permanently at edge locations.

Other Semi-managed hosts

I am aggregating all other providers that offer Ghost Blog hosting here. They are mostly following the WordPress mode. But turns out to be more expensive. You need to manage your resources scaling etc yourself too. The list includes (None of them are recommended by me):

1. Hostarmada 12.95 USD/month
2. Hostinger 12 USD/month
3. Elstio minimum (resell other cloud vpses with their own management and markup just like Cloudways)
4. Fastcomet (basically shared VPS, not managed at all)
5. TDM Hosting (10 USD/month)
6. Cloud clusters (6.99 USD/month, infrequent backup)

One-click installs but not Managed and Self-hosted.

I am also not going to talk about all the self-hosted options here much. There are many ways to do it, and you already must have a decent idea about self-hosting. You do have full control of your site, and you do have full control over the headache that comes with self-hosting.

Features

• Your site your rule. You can actually go very efficient and use Varnish to make your blog super fast
• Or you can setup CDNs as you wish ( for example my CDN setup for this blog requires nginx modification.
• You can host multiple blogs on a single server
• Some providers like DigitalOcean, Amazon Lightshell gives one click reply option for Ghost blogs.
• A better option is to host Ghost in docker containers rather than using the cli route.

Pros

• Usually cheap
• All features available in Ghost no restrictions.
• No file uploads limit. And ofcourse no limt on members, staffs integrations or anything.
• Fun experience for some people.
• You can modify Ghost core software to make it better suited for you.
• You can host your blog for free on free vpses (like me) or on your NAS or on a Raspberry Pi at your home.

Cons

• You need to have a backup plan and a disaster recovery plan.
• One click deployments are easy to start with but may be fatal if you don't know what you are doing.
• DigitalOcean 1 click deployment requires minimum 12 USD (it no longer is at 6 USD) per month, and without proper CDN that can barely handle my 100rps TTFB test. With CDN that should not be the problem. But don't forget to pay extra for a disk snapshot backup.

Some tips for self hosters

• Prefer docker over CLI
• Ghost Forum is a life saver
• Don't make excuses to not backup.
• Reserve the public IP address and Use disk backup too as a quick disaster recovery method. ( It once saved me- From a corrupt server to up and running in 4 minutes)
• Use monitoring services like uptime kuma or uptime robots.

Control for speed test: My own self hosted site

This site www.techweirdo.net is selfhosted on a free Oracle cloud VPS. And I use Bunny CDN for the site. Cost me about 1 USD per month in CDN. And performance, well check for yourself. Here is the TTFB result for my blog a page that is not frequently used-. For HTML I use edge caching and origin shield from Bunny

I also use a seperate cdn setup for assets so that updating site doesn't purge the assets too. It serves all css, js and images. And uses edge cache and permacache and high browser cache.

And this is the type of performance I tried searching in managed ghost hosting options. I don't want users to hate Ghost CMS itself because of a bad host (this happens a lot with WordPress, WordPress can also be fast, try visiting nasa.gov). So I took a deep dive into the hosts trying to understand them.

I didn't expected the shoping for managed Ghost hosting options to be this complex (lot easier than wp). You do have to pay higher price for higher performance, but in many cases paying more does not come with higher performance. If you blog can't handle being viral out off no where then where is the fun.

To conclude for now, I would recommend only 2 hosts among the fully managed options, Ghost Pro itself and Magicpages they both have good support too. For a free blog you can go with digitalpress, honestly surprised with their performance on even the free plan. For semi managed pikapods is a good option and for self hosters, I would recommend you to go the docker way, rather than using the one click deployments. Do give me feedback about the post, and tell me how can I improve. If this post helped you, and you want to support this blog you can use my Magicpages referral link or tip.

I started writing this blog expecting a healthy competition among Ghost hostings options. Honestly I am a bit disappointed.

Here are some resources that may help you

1. CDN setup

Boost Ghost Blog Speed: Easiest Bunny CDN Integration Guide

Learn to integrate Bunny CDN with Ghost Blogs for faster performance. Step-by-step guide covers full page caching, and automatic purging. Membership Works”

The TechWeirdoShounak Pal

How to Optimize Cloudflare Caching for Blazing Fast Ghost Blog

Updated guide to get the best performance possible for your ghost blog with Cloudflare.

The TechWeirdoShounak Pal

2. Ghost forum

Ghost Forum

Discussion about the professional open source publishing platform

Ghost Forum

That's it for today, hope this article helped.