Pine Ghost hosting

After many failed side-projects, I've finally launched something that can be considered an actual, self-contained, useful MVP 🎉

Introducing:

Pine - a managed Ghost hosting provider.

I spent some time messing around with the idea back in August. I had the last week of December off, so I took the time to finish it.

What is it, and why?

I was playing around with the idea of starting a blog and wanted to use Ghost. However, apart from the developers of Ghost, there are not a lot of providers to choose from.

Combine that with a technical itch ("how would I build something that provisions infrastructure?") and here we are.

How does it work?

You log in, enter the name of your publication, and click a button.

Two minutes later, you can start using your very own Ghost website.

What's the tech stack?

It's a classic web application written in .NET.

It uses:

• Auth0 for login,
• Digital Ocean for a managed Kubernetes cluster,
• AWS RDS databases,
• AWS S3 for storage,
• AWS Route53 for managing DNS,
• SendGrid for transactional e-mails,
• Stripe for payments,
• Netlify + Eleventy for the marketing page,
• Termly for the legal policies,
• Papercups for the chat widget, which goes straight to Slack

For design, I used Tailwind UI and Figma. Tailwind is so good! Without it, none of this would've happened.

It's really amazing how many tools out there are available for free.

How was the price determined?

I had some people ask me about the price. To be honest, I just picked something at random. I can always adjust it later, but I wanted to get the ball rolling.

What's next?

Not completely sure, to be honest. I'm better at building stuff than the next/actually-hard part.

Currently planning to set up a blog for Pine itself (yay, dogfooding!), where I document:

• how it's built,
• how to use Pine,
• how to create custom themes.

Then see if that helps me generate some traffic. I could link to it from the marketing page, to have it under the same domain for some SEO.

In fact, how I would set that up, could be an interesting blog post by itself 🤔

Any traction yet?

Not really, but I just launched it.

I experimented a bit with some Reddit ads, because I'm impatient, and got my first trial user. That was pretty cool. I realize it's just a trial user, but they cared enough to enter their payment information, so I take it as a good sign.

Thanks for reading, I'm really happy to have this out! Let's see how this works out.