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Burying ghosts: Why I killed my blog after 18 years
I began blogging in 2006, and through its many incarnations (WordPress, static-site generators, and finally Ghost), I self-hosted my site out of the stubborn belief that creators need to own their platform.
For the last four years, my site has been powered by Ghost, an open-source content management system with built-in membership and newsletter support. My hope was to create a reader-supported business based on blogging and writing serialised stories delivered by email.
A few weeks ago, I shut it down and replaced my Ghost-powered website with:
- A static HTML landing page I host for free on Netlify.
- Medium for blogging.
- Substack for newsletters.
Here are the reasons why I ditched self-hosting.
1. I’m tired of running servers
Running Ghost, WordPress, Drupal, or any traditional database-driven content management system requires a hosting plan or provisioning a server. Starting in 2014, I deployed my site on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) on the cloud-hosting platform DigitalOcean.
As easy as DigitalOcean makes provisioning servers, maintaining them is a royal pain in the arse — even if you take the time to automate the process. When…
