My blog is hosted on a bare metal Scaleway toaster for 2.99 a month and runs great for a small personal blog. Might be nice to have more firepower for a small business that has a steady ingress of users, but for me, it's been great!
I remember when they launched with a $5/month hosting plan, then when they raised it to $10. Just looked at the pricing page and the minimum is now $36/month (or $29/month billed yearly). That's some serious sticker shock.
The thing is, it doesn't matter if it is that much better than Squarespace or WordPress, that's just way too much money for a personal blog, even before the conversion to AUD I'd have to face.
These were my thoughts exactly. Maybe it just hasn't made business sense for them to host cheaper plans, since it's available to self-host. But you're right, even against competitors (Squarespace) it's quite a bit more expensive. Not sure what justifies such a gap.
At one point it looks like they'd even jacked it up to $79/month minimum, and the $29/month basic plan was added since then [1]. I guess that didn't sell well.
I have no experience with squarespace (just hear about them in podcasts), but I know they have pretty nice templates, they host blogs, stores (digital and physical), podcasts, and probably more, priced at $12 or $18/month.
From a cursory glance through Ghost's site I'm not seeing what value they bring to the table that makes it worth more. Reeeeaaaallly good blog, I guess?
I am fortunate enough to be on the $10 plan, but given how little traffic my site gets cutting it in half with the smallest DO box would still be nice.
You could move from Ghost Pro to another Ghost provider without being completely manual. A quick google turned up FastComet at $2.95/month. Page claims 1-click Ghost installation, easy Ghost upgrade service, and daily/weekly Ghost backups.
With a dedicated server, you can have fantasic results. I'm hosting a Ghost server with docker-compose and Traefik + Let's Encrypt, and the thing is snappy beyon belief.
The server is a 14€/month with 16G/Corei5 2,8Ghz/2To HDD/1GB bandwidth. When you take in account the 15€ annually for the domain name, it comes twice cheaper that ghost.
You can also host other things on that, since Ghost takes up maybe 500M of ram.