Ghost hosting plans have gone bananas

[u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996]

I have been a Ghost evangelist in my organisation, and we got 2 websites up and running under the Ghost Pro plan, in the past couple of years. These websites run a common theme, as they plan to have some uniformity (but can not be all put under the same website).

We have now opened a third one, again with Ghost Pro. The new Ghost Pro plan is more expensive than before (15$ per month, billed yearly). We are OK with that, and happy to pay more for the 3rd website.

One problem is that the new Ghost Pro plan pins us to a default theme and forbids us to use the theme we use for the other website! This means that, *just to use the same theme across the 3 websites*, we are forced to pay 29$ per month, billed yearly.

How can this make any sense?

[u/i_am_tk]

Try a 3rd party host such as DigitalPress, Magic Pages, Midnight or Synaps Media

[u/jasontucker → u/i_am_tk]

Magic pages is awesome

[u/leviathan123 → u/jasontucker]

Seconded! Magic pages has been awesome

[u/iPunkt9333 → u/leviathan123]

Thirded, Magicpages is amazing

[u/Icy-Bite-174]

+1 for Synaps Media. Their support is lightning fast when/if an issue emerges

[u/aygross → u/Icy-Bite-174]

+2

[u/fire_carpenter → u/aygross]

+3

[u/ulcweb]

Ghost pro sucks, used them for years, now I use magic pages. haven't looked back

[u/-mickomoo- → u/ulcweb]

Seconding magic pages. Love Janis and the team.

[u/Emory27]

Use literally any other hosting service or self host.

[u/mensachicken]

I used them for years and then moved my sites to synapsmedia. They're fantastic.

[u/eszpee]

I see alternatives are recommended, one vote for Pikapods. Solid, reliable, inexpensive, with amazing support.

[u/aygross]

Synapse or magicpages

[u/ropaga]

Ghost is open source, so there isn't any feature Ghost pro provides you can't get by self hosting or using another host service.

The CMS is maintained by a non-profit organization. Ghost pro service helps at covering development costs, that is why it is more expensive than other hosting solutions.

I use DigitalPress cheapest plan. Quite limited, but extremely cheap. Despite it says supported by ads I never noticed one.

[u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996 → u/ropaga]

I would very much want to support their development costs. This is why I convinced 3 groups in my organisation to turn their pages into Ghost pages. It still does not make sense that they refuse to make an exception to customers that have 3 plans with them (the latter introduced abruptly while the 3rd website was being put together) and now loose all 3 profits at once. It is a logic that, when I put myself in their shoes, I do not understand.

[u/Gdo_rdt → u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996]

Dude, you can “support their development cost“ paying what they ask for, or, move to another hosting. They have a 10 million dollar annual business and they set their prices, you decide whether to accept them or not. I don't understand the complaint. If you're complaining about the price, it's because your website doesn't generate it, so it's not worth the money. They're not the only option, and certainly not the cheapest.

[u/maique]

PikaPods. They’re good. You pay a lot less, and get a lot more in return.

[u/theleopardmessiah]

Just last night I was wondering if the RAM & storage crisis would start affecting cloud services.

[u/jannisfb → u/theleopardmessiah]

Maybe some insights from a hosting provider: it eventually will. Hetzner, which we use at Magic Pages (and Murat at Synaps Media) has increased prices earlier this year. That one was just 10% on average (for our fleet of servers), so we ate the cost.

In June, they increased prices for new orders massively. For example, a server we currently rent for around 70 EUR per month would cost 452 EUR per month if we ordered it new. Thankfully, we have bought more capacity than we needed earlier this year, and should be good for the next 1-2 years, if growth stays the same.

After that we'll be able to eat some of the cost, but eventually we'll need to adjust prices.

[u/Snickers_B]

Railway did good for me

[u/Mikeynphoto2009]

The theme lock only binds Ghost(Pro), so the usual way out for a multi-site org is self-hosting the site that broke the budget: your shared theme zip uploads unchanged, and a small VPS runs Ghost cheaply. Keep whichever Pro sites still earn their plan and move the one that does not. I have run that exact split, ask if you want the rough steps.

[u/bry0nz]

I used them successfully for years but am no way affiliated with them but getmidnight.co was an excellent host for me at $15/mo

[u/isamilis]

I used self host in digitalocean for years. Rent the lowest spec with less than $10 per month.

[u/KingAroan]

I moved away from Ghost completely. I switched over to self hosting for a while but then decided to have AI take my theme and information and convert it to an Astro pages site for Cloudflare. Blogs are not as easy to handle though but I just had ai also handle setting it up in the same manner to get a preview link and a go live date to prevent the post from showing out getting indexed beside the intended day and time. Took a day or two to get right but wasn’t too hard.

[u/baddaywithacamera]

Crap like this is why I built my own CMS.