And how is it lying about their comparisons? It is indeed simpler to set up a Ghost site than a Wordpress site, and has more features out-of-the-box that you'd otherwise have to download sketchy plugins for with Wordpress/etc.
I...am not sure about that. WordPress, for all its warts, is exceedingly easy for even non-technical users to get up and running; that was a huge contributing factor to its rise. And a large part of that ease of use came from its choice of PHP and MySQL.
I know that in 2018 it's a lot easier to get non-PHP web apps up and running than it was in, say, 2008, but with the exception of hosting providers that have gone out of their way to set up "one-click installs" for Ghost like Digital Ocean, Node, Python, et. al, are still harder. This is something that John Nolan's post pretty explicitly acknowledged:
"We spent several years trying to engineer our way out of this in increasingly complex ways, so that people could set up a publication on Ghost with the same level of ease as they do on Medium. We never even got close. It's just not how modern web technology works."
(And, no, "just use a Docker container" is not a viable answer to give to anyone who doesn't already know what container technology is. Sorry.)
> Decentralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on ease of setup. Nothing beats the UX of signing up for a centralised application.
And self-hosting Ghost is just as simple as Wordpress. Instead of sudo apt-get install'ing apache and PHP, you're sudo apt-get install'ing nginx and nodejs. The ghost installer handles the rest.
Here is an independent speed test which finds Ghost (more specifically: Node) to be up to 1900% faster than WP - https://blog.appdynamics.com/engineering/example-node-js-fas...
We don't make baseless claims and we're not in the business of lying to anyone.
Managed hosting - $29, you get your own server, app, automation, backups, and 24/7 support to make sure everything is working great
Centralised, multi-tenant application - $0-$9, you get no server. You get access to our app for your use. You cannot modify it or run any third party code.
We do managed hosting - and managed WP hosts... also do managed hosting. That's why it's a reasonable comparison point.
WordPress.com is not managed hosting. It's a heavily modified centralised multi-tenant application which loosely resembles WordPress. It does not run the open source codebase at all.
:vanishes in a puff of php:
It's still not equivalent to running the same code, or being in any way a comparable to a managed host. Which is the point that you skipped right over, as is your custom :)
Ghost is 20 times faster. And once you add a single WP plugin, it's 100 times faster.
For 4 dollars a month you can.
https://www.siteground.com/wpbeginner-managed
50 dollars a month seems extremely costly. For that amount $600 a year it would be cheaper to hire someone to self host for you.
For security beyond running updated software, it includes a Wordpress-tuned web application firewall and the $24.95/month tier includes "Malware Scanning & Repair."
However, I'm pretty sure a person that was really interested in self hosting would not have trouble figuring it out.
I don't necessarily think it's bad that they don't emphasize how to use the open source version. After all, it is a business.
"Being a non-profit means that the company has no shares. I don't own it. Hannah doesn't own it. Nobody owns it - it's an independent entity. The company makes money and pays expenses, salaries and taxes as normal - but there's no way for it to be bought or sold either in part (investment) or as a whole (aquisition). Any profit the company makes can only ever be reinvested, not distributed. We can't cash out. Ever. Also the entire product is open source and has no copyright. Anyone can do whatever they want with our code, for free."
For reference the mobile homepage only says "The professional publishing platform"
I know people don't want to believe that and it's a difficult thing to accept, which is why most people just cling to the "non-profit" label, but reality is realty, whether you accept it or not.
I was under the impression being setup as a non profit grants various tax optimization strategies / returns. Which can be probably redistributed as salary.
But in this case it’s really an absurd implication. There is literally no personal benefit to founders making their company a non-profit. Yes they can pull salary from it, but they could do that in a for-profit company too. Not only that, but it’s impossible to sell a 501c3 non-profit because there are no shares. It can only dissolve, in which case the board must distribute any remaining assets to another non-profit.
I don't argue being a non-profit is a cause for suspicion in case of a saas, I just don't see why would it be noble.
Conversely, there is little to no reason for being setup as a non-profit in Ghost's case.
But really the important point is you cannot sell your company. How many years of 10% extra salary is worth sacrificing your ability to liquidate all the blood sweat and tears you put into your company?
As mentioned several times in this thread, our company is based in Singapore, not the US. The structures, laws and taxes are not equivalent.
I wrote a post about this a while back here: https://john.onolan.org/what-it-means-to-be-non-profit/
Because one can cash out through a 500k a year salary
Seriously, looking for nefarious motivation here is really grasping at straws.
They are a Singapore non-profit. https://blog.ghost.org/moving-to-singapore/
Very cool and inspiring post. That said:
- Ghost's marketing materials tend to outright lie to users when making comparisons to WordPress or other platforms.
- I dislike OSS projects that hide their OSS nature. Why does a user need to pay $29/mo for an entry level blog? Why isn't there any obvious mention of the OSS nature of the project on the pricing page, home page, or features page?
- What's been done about the memory issues? Last time I tried ghost, it was a bit of a memory hog.