Currently use Ghost on my own web server. Web server is on CentOs which goody doesn't officially support so had to hack around to make it work which can cause issues when upgrading so thinking of moving to one click soon install on digital Ocean droplet.
There's not much maintenance apart from running the upgrader every now and again. There's the obvious server patching as well but I do that on a regular basis anyway. The main reason for me hosting it on my own DO droplet instead of Ghost hosting is I don't get a huge amount of traffic to the blog, so I can install it on a $5-10 droplet whereas ghost hosting starts at $29.
I tried Wordpress but gave up. Once you start adding a few popular plugins you end up in the weekly update&testing-if-everything-still-works cycle quickly. What's your experience?
I tried to use WP for my entire site + blog. Blog features are fine, but for main site, even with a good looking theme, I had very little zero-code flexibility in creating customized landing pages. There are some UI builders for WP pages, best I found was BeaverBuilder, but it's a page content builder, you're still stuck within the constraints of your theme and can't do something spectacular UI-wise. In the end I switched for main site to landen.co
We have got similar feedback about the page builders in WP. Customers are asking to export our landing pages to WP which is very interesting seeing how long some of these builders have been in business compared to us and how large their teams are.
I would love for you to try https://versoly.com/ if you had some time your opinion would be super valuable. Ideally we could book a call and I would watch you use Versoly while you share your screen :)
Yeah. You could also run it on a very cheap VPS like $2.50 a month as it will great 0 traffic and speed isn't important if you want remote access.
To be honest if I wasn't running the platform I would just host on Netlify very easy to do and you can have a git integration that literally pulls it from their every commit.
I literally just launched one this weekend, actually! It's just another section of the marketing site, built with Hugo (which I love) and hosted on Netlify. https://gohugo.io
We built a homegrown blog with RoR, it was easy.
Ghost on Digital Ocean for $5/mo
Currently use Ghost on my own web server. Web server is on CentOs which goody doesn't officially support so had to hack around to make it work which can cause issues when upgrading so thinking of moving to one click soon install on digital Ocean droplet.
Any downside to running in a droplet vs their managed service? What maintenance is there and how frequently?
There's not much maintenance apart from running the upgrader every now and again. There's the obvious server patching as well but I do that on a regular basis anyway. The main reason for me hosting it on my own DO droplet instead of Ghost hosting is I don't get a huge amount of traffic to the blog, so I can install it on a $5-10 droplet whereas ghost hosting starts at $29.
Wordpress on Heroku for everything upstart/untested/playtime.
The company website is on App Engine (various java components).
(I know, super uncool stack, but hey, it works!)
I tried Wordpress but gave up. Once you start adding a few popular plugins you end up in the weekly update&testing-if-everything-still-works cycle quickly. What's your experience?
For sure Wordpress isn't super cool nor is it best from the tech perspective, but:
Any other problems you had with WP? I'm currently building something to compete with them in a certain niche.
I tried to use WP for my entire site + blog. Blog features are fine, but for main site, even with a good looking theme, I had very little zero-code flexibility in creating customized landing pages. There are some UI builders for WP pages, best I found was BeaverBuilder, but it's a page content builder, you're still stuck within the constraints of your theme and can't do something spectacular UI-wise. In the end I switched for main site to landen.co
We have got similar feedback about the page builders in WP. Customers are asking to export our landing pages to WP which is very interesting seeing how long some of these builders have been in business compared to us and how large their teams are.
I would love for you to try https://versoly.com/ if you had some time your opinion would be super valuable. Ideally we could book a call and I would watch you use Versoly while you share your screen :)
Jekyll on Github pages
Built ours with Ghost, converted to static and host on S3.
Static sites are very fast and require 0 maintenance.
Ideally we will have blogs built into the platform soon and will swap to that.
Zero maintenance sounds tempting. Do you build locally and then push to S3?
Yeah. You could also run it on a very cheap VPS like $2.50 a month as it will great 0 traffic and speed isn't important if you want remote access.
To be honest if I wasn't running the platform I would just host on Netlify very easy to do and you can have a git integration that literally pulls it from their every commit.
How much maintenance is there on ghost? Is the 30usd managed service worth it?
Not to sure, haven't had to do an upgrade yet.
I literally just launched one this weekend, actually! It's just another section of the marketing site, built with Hugo (which I love) and hosted on Netlify. https://gohugo.io