Re:Ditching Medium
by npunt on Sunday January 06, 2019 @10:56PM
(#18842650)
Perhaps if you're doing this type of work frequently, but if you're just a regular person who wants a blog it's not trivial nor advisable. Configuring your DO instance can be a pain and you have to manually keep Ghost up to date by SSHing in. Definitely not set and forget.
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The author's post seemed to target a developer blogger audience as opposed to regular people.
With this particular image, there's virtually no DO configuration (just standard size / region settings which have smart defaults IIRC). You do have to SSH in, but the new Ghost 2.0 CLI handles updating Ghost much more smoothly than in the past. I've been happy with it personally.
The DO one-click is super easy, but the SSL config and adding Cloudflare wound up being a huge pain. DO's docs aren't great and that meant I spent hours in config land just trying to get tablestakes blog features of HTTPS and DDoS protection.
Ghost 2.0 is definitely better than prior versions but still needs babysitting. As an infrequent blogger, I've found I am updating Ghost more frequently than I'm blogging.
Github pages or Gatsby (via something like Netlify) are much better suited to this problem because server config & SSL are handled and they're just serving static pages.
I used Cloudflare with Ghost pre-2.0 but switched to Let's Encrypt for 2.0 [1]. I found this easier than using Cloudflare with 2.0 which handles auto renewing the cert as well.