Hosting a Ghost Blog for free
You may have noticed my blog is running Ghost, one of the best blog platforms in the world. But what if I told you that I hosted this Ghost blog for free. Follow along and even you can find fews ways to launch your ghost blog for free.
No need to use medium, ghost covers it all. It even introduced a new way to earn money for both premium bloggers and starters.
A boring Introduction, but absolutely necessary
There are many ways you can host a ghost blog, but usually people prefer to host their ghost blog in three ways:
- Ghost (pro): starts with 29$ per Month
- Self Hosting: Digital Ocean Droplet 5$ per Month
- Free method: Which we are looking into.
Asusually, There are always pros & cons for every method. But before we proceed to the Free Method, let's get a brief idea about the first two methods and how the free method is different from above two. Which will helps us to compensate our cons by using some third party services (Which were also free).
#1 Ghost(Pro)
It is the indigenous way of hosting ghost, which suggests that there are not many cons in it except for the price. There are 3 different plans provided by the ghost org and listed below.
- Basic (29$)
- Standard (79$)
- Business (199$)
#2 Self Hosting
You can host almost any open source projects on your own, if you have the required hardware. And I would suggest using Digital Ocean for the following reasons:
- Fast and Reliable
- Special Offers if you are a student
- One Click Ghost Installer
- It only cost 5$ per Month
- Full Control of your blog and VPS
In Fact, you will not be able to find many difference between Ghost(pro) and Self-Hosted ghost.
Here are few differences that matters most among a tiny list:
- No official and personal support from Ghost org.
- No CDN and Caching.
- No SSL certificate and Personal Security
#3 Hosting Ghost for Free
There are again 3 ways to host ghost blog for absolutely free of cost.
- DigitalPress.
- Heroku.
- Netlify.
But in this present session, I would prefer to suggest only one ie., fastest and new way of installing ghost for free.
Digitalpress
DigitalPress is really free. Their ambition is to enable everyone to tell their story without having to think about price. The free plan includes variety of themes and design layouts to show your style. Customize blog with your own cover pictures, embed videos, tweets, music clips and share joy with your readers.
Your blog is supported by ads. Digitalpress pay close attention to pick ads which are relevant to your audience to match your content and their interests.
Create account in DigitalPress and follow the below steps:
- Step 01: Create New Blog
- Step 02: Choose name of your blog
- Step 03: Click on Ghost Administrative dash board
- Step 04: Create ghost admin account
- Step 05: Configure DNS in DigitalPress Dashboard
Thatsit, your ghost blog is online and you can choose between a various number of themes provided by default. This blog is hosted in such a way.
Other Tweaks
- Heroku
- Netlify
- Free domain
- Configuring Free ssl and caching (cloudflare)
If you can see this, which means, I still work under this project to improve the accessibility of other tweaks.