Obviously by paying Ghost to host it for you is a bit pricey since they have to make a profit as well, but the amazing thing is that the whole thing is open sourced for people like us to self host (I wrote a post about how I self host a bunch of stuff including ghost: http://sdan.xyz/sd2)
That's likely one of the biggest reasons you can't get a shared host to run this.
WordPress is still installable via Softaculous.
call it gHosting
Looks like I have a weekend project now!
And this is precisely the pain point of the gp... This isn't just reasonable, it's utterly sensible.
That's why I want Ghost to offer a lower tier. That way I could get started at a price I can afford where I'm at, support the development of Ghost, and have an easy upgrade path if I need it. It's the curve, not the price, that I don't like.
On Lobsters (can't find thread), I mentioned that the price was too high for large amount of potential users, the code was open source, and low-margin providers could host it for the masses on the cheap. If wanting to be ethical, they could even send a percentage of the revenue and/or improvements back to Ghost.
I strongly encourage this model given dominance of sites such as Wordpress. Ghost can keep reaping the benefits of the premium market just publishing source. They can simultaneously stay profitable and democratize the tech through third parties.
I understand if that's a hard no. You seem to be aiming at people who are or plan to be big time enough to hire people to help. Getting people in who might head that way so they have an easy upgrade path might be good though. If I were the kind of person Patreon's top plan aims at, any Ghost plan would be an easy sell, but even thinking about that is a long way off for me.