How to Move to Ghost In 2025
This Just In: Own your own publication by launching a website running Ghost. It’s not as difficult as it sounds.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I moved from Substack over two years ago. I left because they do not moderate hate speech and engage in fuzzy accounting practices. Instead of moving my site back to WordPress, I opted for Ghost.
Ghost is an open-source content management system (CMS) that supports blog posts and email newsletters. It offers payment gateways, pay-walled content, and member logins. Basically, all of the things I need as an online writer.
Unlike WordPress, Ghost has a bit more complicated installation and update process. I set up a VPS with Opalstack, a fantastic web hosting provider with a truly awesome support team.
While I am a big proponent of making the web personal again and owning your own corner, Ghost requires a bit of tech skills that most creators do not have. It’s why answering the question of how to get started with Ghost is never straightforward.
Over the last few months, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with updates, which require using SSH to connect to the Ghost installation and update via the command line. Not because I find this overtly complex, but because it’s a hassle. It’s not something that “just works” or, as with WordPress, is handled automatically by the software. Ghost frequently requires additional server upgrades to function, and those sometimes work and sometimes fail, leading to countless hours trying to find a solution.
Early last week, while searching online trying to debug one such issue, I came across a post from Cathy Sarisky explaining that she does not recommend most people self-host Ghost because of the headaches. Cathy Sarisky is a big supporter of the Ghost community and frequently contributes to feature releases. Hearing Cathy she doesn’t recommend self-hosting, my ears perked up. Instead, she recommends people use managed hosting, where a server admin handles all the behind-the-scenes stuff for you.
Ghost(Pro) is the obvious choice here, since the Ghost organization maintains it and helps support the active development. Though, for my current audience, Ghost(Pro) is $165/month… Managed hosting is not cheap, mainly because sending email is not cheap.
However, Cathy also recommends Magic Pages, which is the same concept as Ghost(Pro) at a fraction of the cost. Instead of tiered pricing based on membership counts, Magic Pages has a flat rate based on the features you want. Each tier has a set amount of monthly email sends. Need more email sends? You pay a small flat fee to send in batches of 10,000. This pricing resonated with me.
I have since moved the site to Magic Pages (affiliate link). If you subscribe to Write Now interviews, you got last week’s email sent through the new servers and didn’t even notice (hopefully).
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, who runs Magic Pages, is awesome and handled the migration from Opalstack. I simply sent him my content and database backups, and he dealt with the rest. He was super pleasant to work with and quick to respond via email. What’s best is that I no longer have to manage Ghost updates or worry about server components. No more headaches!
To sum it all up, how should you move your website to Ghost in 2025? Subscribe to Magic Pages (affiliate link) and call it a day. You’ll save yourself hours of frustration and it will just work.
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