Strong upvoting after our conversation so more people see it. Raymond made a strong case, I’m seriously considering it and would like everyone else’s take on Ghost, good or bad. Getting the experiences of others who’ve used it, and can verify that it works and can be trusted (or not, which would be even more useful if true!), would be very helpful.
The basic downside versus Substack is lack of Substack’s discovery, such as it is, not sure of magnitude of that, and that people won’t be used to it and won’t have already entered CC info, which will hurt revenue some (but again, how much? Anyone have estimates?) and the start-up costs would be more annoying.
In exchange you get full customization, open source that can easily be self-hosted in a pinch, lower costs given expected size of the audience, better analytics, better improvement in feature sets over time given track records, etc. But I’d have to do at least some work to get that (e.g. you need to add a comment section on your own).
Is ‘can be self-hosted in a pinch’ also a feature of Wordpress? Also, how does Ghost and WordPress stack up against ‘has anyone ever self-hosted?’ (More people doing that, might make it easier to find out how.)
I think you can self-host WP in a pinch as well. I’ve been chatting with someone from WP trying to better understand what it is offering. It does seem like I’m missing a lot of simple knowledge of how to use WP better, and it’s possible that WP is ‘good enough’ if things were explained properly, and then there’s a bunch of deep functionality and customization potentially hidden. Yet that doesn’t do any good if I don’t use it.
I have self-hosted WordPress and can confirm that it is possible (and not even very hard).
The big downside is security (but you can mitigate this substantially by using a managed host such as NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, and hosting only your WordPress blog on the site in question).
Strong upvoting after our conversation so more people see it. Raymond made a strong case, I’m seriously considering it and would like everyone else’s take on Ghost, good or bad. Getting the experiences of others who’ve used it, and can verify that it works and can be trusted (or not, which would be even more useful if true!), would be very helpful.
The basic downside versus Substack is lack of Substack’s discovery, such as it is, not sure of magnitude of that, and that people won’t be used to it and won’t have already entered CC info, which will hurt revenue some (but again, how much? Anyone have estimates?) and the start-up costs would be more annoying.
In exchange you get full customization, open source that can easily be self-hosted in a pinch, lower costs given expected size of the audience, better analytics, better improvement in feature sets over time given track records, etc. But I’d have to do at least some work to get that (e.g. you need to add a comment section on your own).
Is ‘can be self-hosted in a pinch’ also a feature of Wordpress? Also, how does Ghost and WordPress stack up against ‘has anyone ever self-hosted?’ (More people doing that, might make it easier to find out how.)
I think you can self-host WP in a pinch as well. I’ve been chatting with someone from WP trying to better understand what it is offering. It does seem like I’m missing a lot of simple knowledge of how to use WP better, and it’s possible that WP is ‘good enough’ if things were explained properly, and then there’s a bunch of deep functionality and customization potentially hidden. Yet that doesn’t do any good if I don’t use it.
I have self-hosted WordPress and can confirm that it is possible (and not even very hard).
The big downside is security (but you can mitigate this substantially by using a managed host such as NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, and hosting only your WordPress blog on the site in question).