Gloat
Affordable, unlimited Ghost hosting
I launched gloat.dev in June, installing self-hosted sites for customers on their own servers. In November I launched a managed host ongloat.com, where customers get a Ghost site set up on Gloat's own servers.
In total, I've installed 60 sites:
- 8 self-hosted, without memberships ($59)
- 33 self-hosted ($89)
- 16 hosted ($129–$189)
Some stats:
- Most popular region: New York (48% of all sites)
- Most common domain registrars: GoDaddy (25%), Namecheap (22%)
- Current hosted MRR is $227
- Over $6k revenue
Overall, I'm very honoured and excited to be helping people get started and set up on Ghost, and hopefully starting to make businesses from their writing.
The hosted version of Gloat has reached the first goal of $100 MRR.
It took about 6 weeks since the initial launch of the product.
Gloat's pricing is purely annually at the moment, which means high revenue but slower MRR growth. Revenue is currently over $1,200.
I've now been running gloat.dev for four months now. In that time I've set up tens of Ghost sites for writers and bloggers.
I've fine-tuned the processes but it's still a pain to help get my customers set up; they need to add me to their domain host and have to create Mailgun and Digital Ocean accounts for me to be able to create their self-hosted site.
Today, I'm adding another option to Gloat: straight-up Ghost hosting.
"Gloat hosting" has two main selling points:
- there is a simple, low one-time yearly fee (currently $149/year)
- your Ghost site has no limits (every other Ghost host limits your site by page views, members, staff members etc.)
Luckily I've been setting up Ghost sites frequently for months so this business move changes very little for me work-wise. I still set up each site manually, but the change is huge for my customers: there is nothing to set up or invite me to.
I'm hoping this new offering now makes it even easier for writers to get going on Ghost.
More information at gloathosting.com
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Hi Dan, Glad to see this service. I recently created a blog on Ghost and yet to make it live. Would like to know if subdirectory is possible within Gloat? eg. host on https://domain.com/blog.
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Yes, this is possible. Are you using nginx?
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Dan, it's not on nginx. Just a regular node js server app hosted on Render.com.
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That’s actually a great question! I’d be pleasantly surprised if he was able to do this! Thought this was a technical limitation though.
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Good idea! :) I have recently set up Ghost for my wife and I think there's a lot of room for improvements. It's quite simple once you have Kubernetes manifests as you can keep adding more nodes/ghost instances. They all can share the same database.
The only challenge I saw was how to make the filesystem horizontally scalable as by default uses fs for caching. I imagine you could use Ceph for this but feels like a big operational burden.
Did you go with normal VMs for your project or Kubernetes/Nomad?
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Hey Karolis. I use DigitalOcean droplets for all Gloat sites.
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Gloat has a brand new site.
Initially I launched Gloat quickly using a very simple one-page site.
The new one expands, more clearly explaining each service and with a beautiful design.
I also wrote a page explaining how Gloat compares to the default Ghost host, Ghost(Pro).
I spent a ton of time refining the copy of this site. I'm very proud of it!
1 Comment
Sounds awesome! How have you been promoting the service so far?