Have to set up a site. A sort of blog, where we’ll have text and photos from several trips, a record. Mine and movieStar’s. I’m thinking about Ghost. Looks good to movieStar. Can I pull this off with a droplet on DigitalOcean? Price wise its ok. Worried about updates.
@maique digitalpress.blog has a hosted plan that is cheaper than Ghost's own, but I have no idea who digitalpress are 🤣
@maique I use Digital Ocean to host a Ghost site for one of my businesses and once you get a groove, the updates aren't too bad, really. I run one command to retrieve all updates for my droplet, and Ghost's documentation is pretty good overall for updates otherwise. There's no way to update from within the dashboard as there is on Wordpress, but I've found SSH manageable, and I'd never used SSH before transitioning my site there (so that's been both daunting and exciting to learn).
@philly I don’t mind the tinkering, just afraid I might end up with a botched install, and ruin everything😊
@mpmilestogo Thank you. Not sure about the PPA for Ghost, looking into that as well. My fear is getting stuck somewhere in the future and that would be a pain. They do have the Ghost droplet, all ready to go, but I’m not sure yet if I’d be able to use the rest of the server. On the other hand there’s this hosted service, and extra dólar a month, and no worries about the maintenance😊 Decisions, decisions 😊
@mpmilestogo Oops! Sorry about that mess 😳 And thank you for the support. I'm considering price/learning experience/hassle. This one is mainly for movieStar's sake, so hassle plays an important role here. As far as I can tell the hosting will be a dollar extra, and none of the hassle. I might go with that, and keep the Ubuntu server on DigitalOcean for a while longer, that will give me a lot more chances of pestering you 🤣
@maique The pre-built Ghost droplets have worked well for me (I have 2 of them). Updates can be done easily by launching the console right from the DO control panel. Usually it's just sudo -i -u ghost-mgr && cd /var/www/ghost && ghost upgrade but once in a while Node or NPM need updating first. The errors are pretty helpful when that happens and it's usually a 15 or 20-minute detour.
@jack Thank you, that's reassuring. If you don't mind, I'll ask another one. At the moment I'm thinking 5USD for DO, 6USD for DigitalPress, the extra dollar well spent for the no-hassle approach. But I have a question regarding the DO Ghost dropplet: can I still access the rest of the distro, and keep playing with it, or is the droplet a Ghost-only thing? Probably a silly question, but I'm just arriving at DO... I thought about going the way @mpmilestogo talked about, having an Ubuntu droplet, and installing Ghost on top of that. I could then have Ghost, and a playground.
@maique Good question. I don't tinker with mine outside of Ghost (there's yet another small droplet for that :)), but I expect you could, although I'm not sure how "normal" it would be. I have installed Ghost a couple of times from scratch. It wasn't terrible. The Droplet just makes it a little easier to get rolling. I'd not heard of DigitalPress. Seems like a decent hands-off option.
@jack I’ll have to figure this one out. Also checked DigitalPress again, and it’s 6.9€, darn close to the 9$ on Ghost.org. Hmmm… not much in monies, yet almost 50% over the DO droplet 😊
@maique My $5 ($6 with backups) DO droplet runs at about 80% memory usage. There's room, but not a ton.
@jack I went with the DO droplet, also the $5 one. I’ll check the stats, but figured I could at least use it for the setting up, getting the categories and posts up, and if I need I can add more resources later, or just move it to Ghost.org or somewhere else. Thank you so much for the help.
@maique I'll add one other piece of info. If you have a static web site that you can base off a Github repo then you can host that site for free on Digital Ocean's App Platform. I think this means that if whatever generating tool you use produces files (HTML, CSS, JS) that are serviced to web browsers and processed on the client that is a static site. App Platform monitors the repo for changes and re-builds the site whenever the change occurs. They even handle HTTPS. As an example, this repo: github.com/fmcpherso... is hosted using DO App Platform here: shared.frankmcpherson.net
@frankm Thank you! I wasn't aware you could to that! Is there a difference between doing it with DO and having GitHub Pages serve the static site? I tried it in the past, with a Jekyll blog, and that's an experience I enjoyed for a little while. Since that was done I have tried to stay away from having blogs on GitHub. All that dealing with front matter, push here, git there, was a little too much work for what I wanted. I suspect this will be updated more often, even if not too often, and I can't see my wife going through all that for her posts 🤣😅 It's a cool way to have a page up, but she would never go for that. She's a Ghost type, at best! 😇