As someone who's manually setup Ghost blog, I'd heavily advise towards just paying for Ghost hosting. I wasted hours setting it up, and I gave up when it came time to configure emailing.
Anyway, here's my blog post on it. I actually pay 20$ to AWS to host my Captain Rover server, but I have multiple web apps running.
I had a heck of a time setting it up to self host myself and I am technically inclined. There was one thing misconfigured by default that took me a few hours to catch. Now I’m trying to figure out why the VM stops responding randomly…free sounded better to me at the time
As a long time happy Ghost user, self hosting is far easier than most stacks, and I just configured a new self-hosted instance for a friend this past week (5.x). Aside from a bug with the Let’s Encrypt auto-config (I had to fix the path to the cert in the generated nginx config), it was otherwise an extremely straightforward process.
I used the mailgun integration for mail, which involved adding a few lines to a config file and typing `ghost restart`.
Self hosting will always involve some fiddling, but I’ve fiddled less with Ghost than almost every other thing I’ve self hosted over the decades. Maybe I’m just lucky.
I had the same experience. I've been self-hosting Ghost sites for years now. Cloudflare + Ghost is a really great combination, you can cache your whole site and set up a webhook to invalidate when you update/add something.
Anyway, here's my blog post on it. I actually pay 20$ to AWS to host my Captain Rover server, but I have multiple web apps running.
https://rhymesworldwide.com/self-hosting-this-blog/