A while ago, I wrote about how I run my blog with a self-hosted Ghost engine. Even though most processes were running on autopilot, they still required periodic attention and maintenance: the Ghost engine required updates, the blog theme needed to be fixed to be compatible with new engine versions, the DigitalOcean droplet hosting the blog demanded patching, and so on. The most annoying part was probably rebooting and troubleshooting the server when the site went down, which started to happen every two to four weeks.

A lot has changed since then, and I decided that it would be the right time to get rid of the administrative overhead of managing the underlying infrastructure. The pricing for Ghost(Pro) became more attractive and comparable with other cheaper self-hosting options. Plus, I’m not very fond of spending time on something that is not of interest or a focus area for me.

Being said that, please expect the following changes:

  • No Facebook Comments anymore. I really regret choosing them over other solutions back then as they happened to be very clunky, error-prone and practically unsupported by Facebook.
    I’m sticking to the native Ghost Comments as of now.
  • I’m abandoning the email newsletters via RSS, Zapier and Mailchimp. Although the related process worked very well and the email campaigns worked just fine, I don’t see a lot of value in keeping such a complex setup. As most of my blog visitors come from other sources, the native email newsletters in Ghost should be enough to update my subscribers on new blog posts.
Please expect the changes in the newsletter design as displayed in the post image.
  • The new clean theme focusing more on the content should improve overall readability and user experience on mobile devices.

Under the hood, the domain was migrated from DNSimple to Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare CDN was turned off as CDN is managed by Ghost(Pro) itself. The hosting also handles the TLS encryption.

So, now I will spend less time “running” my blog and more time publishing new content 😊

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