Was debating between Ghost blog platform and Medium, but now the decision may be easier.
Medium apparently pivoted recently and will be no longer allowing media publishers to put up paywalls/paid subscriptions through what I presume to be third-parties.
You can read more about this change here:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/mediums-latest-pivot-leaves-some-independent-media-in-the-lurch/
I had been debating recently whether I should roll my own blog where I control everything through the Ghost platform on a self-hosted domain, or start by piggy-backing off of the user community on Medium.com. I had also read some thoughts about Medium from Josh Pigford (Baremetrics), where they moved their blog from Medium back to their own hosting, because they felt their content had lost it's face, meaning people reading their Baremetrics posts on Medium only come away remembering they read the article on Medium, and remember less that it was a "Baremetrics" post to begin with.
Have you had to make a decision like this recently? Did you regret going with Ghost or similar self-hosted blog solution? I have to make a decision this weekend (want my MVP built).
I'd stay away from medium... You can always repost your content there with their import feature if you'd like to reach their audience. The site has been going downhill for a while in my opinion and I wouldn't trust them to host my content.
Their decision to forbid custom domains for new blogs was the last straw for me. If we don't own the domain, we don't ultimately own the traffic.
I moved to hosted Wordpress on my own domain. Like everyone here, I have too many things to deal with and I really didn't want to run my own blogging system. I didn't try Ghost but a lot of people know Wordpress so it was easy to delegate some of the work to freelancers.
Should I have tried Ghost? (It's probably too late now, but I'm curious).
For WP, I use Kinsta.com and I can recommend it (I have no affiliation). They aren't the cheapest, but their tools are adequate enough and I only had good experience with their support. They even setup reverse proxy - so I could send certain types of traffic to my application rather than to Wordpress.
Appreciate the feedback very much.
Just to follow up on this, I recently did some similar research and concluded that from an SEO point of view, the best practice is as follows:
In doing so, your SEO 'juice' will be passed on properly to your own site.
Step 2. is probably overkill, but it's just to ensure that you don't lose any points for Google detecting possible content copying, albeit it is unlikely to be an issue but it's better safe than sorry.
All the best!
You could skip step 2 if you use Webmaster tools and manually choose to crawl the blogpost.
Oh oh oh, and, if you're looking for WordPress hosting, go with Flywheel - https://getflywheel.com/.
I'm not affiliated with them, other than through being a VERY satisfied customer after spending 10~ years trying out almost every type of host conceivable.
They're slightly more expensive, but the headache's you'll save yourself and the 2nd-to-none customer support is invaluable.
We recently moved our blog back from medium. We still use it as a channel to share our posts on, but the original post is always on our site.
We didn't use ghost, however, we have no regret about the decision to move the primary blog location back to our own site.
Appreciate the feedback, thanks. Did you go with Ghost alternative like Wordpress or did you roll your own solution? Just curious, since the response may help other readers who stumble into this thread looking for different ideas!
Haha, Ghost is a WP alternative. Not the other way around.
We ended up going with WordPress. It was a team decision, so the marketing team felt more comfortable there and the plugin ecosystem helped to get something out quickly.
Personally, I wanted to go with a static site tool like: Gatsby - https://gatsbyjs.org/ (pick your language, each has its own)but that is because I'm a dev and we like to tinker. 😀
Thanks for asking this question! Learned a lot from the comments on this thread. I had been mulling over this myself, but the recent Medium pivot made the decision for me, as it did for you. I guess this only matters if you're thinking of having a paywall sometime. I cross post from my WP site to Medium now.
I made exactly this decision back in 2014, and wrote a little about my thought process here: http://1rick.com/blogging-with-pelican.html
I opted for a site generator called Pelican, basically the python answer to Jekyll. I've been happy with my choice. No regrets yet!
I have a Wordpress blog. But one look at Ghost last night sealed the deal for the developer in me. Regardless of which way you go keep the Plank metaphor in mind as you build a following. You need three posts to hold up your plank. One post is a space you own and can interact freely with your audience. One you share like any social outlet and one that you buy time on. —- Correction. Spoke to fast. Hugo is the platform that I’m all in with.
Just another reason why you should always be fully in control of your blog and your content. But don't totally neglect Medium. Use it (and other large sites) to syndicate some of your content in order to drive attention back to the main hub that you control.
That's is an interesting question. We also asked it. For now, we have our own blog (called journal) running on our own data and engine. We thought about medium too, of course, but for now, we stay away from it, I don't know if it's wise or not.
How could you even compare the two? ghost is a MIT licensed open source software, sure they do offer hosting, but the software is just as well yours to install and control if you fancy. Like wordpress a decade earlier.
i moved my blog from medium to ghost. for similar reasons. i want to own my data.
and ghost is open source, so i can customize the look and feel if i want to.