[wlesieutre]

Looks great, the payments integration is a great idea.

I've looked at Ghost on and off while considering setting up my personal site, and pricing is the reason I avoided it. I think they started at $5/month for "Ghost Pro" and are now up to $36 for Pro Basic or $99 for Pro Standard (a bit less purchased in bulk). At a minimum, it's now $348/year.

Having paid subscriptions built-in makes that easier to swallow. I don't want any 3rd party ad networks on my site, so subscriptions could help offset the high costs.

Wouldn't help me personally since my site isn't very active and wouldn't get subscribers, but I imagine this will work for some other folks.

[Kihashi]

I self host on a $5/month VPS and it works fine. Granted, I don't really have much traffic, but it sounds like you don't either.

[wlesieutre]

Not much traffic, no. But "spend as little time administrating it as possible" was a goal that had me looking into managed options.

Hugo + Netlify is working well, some up-front work in the setup since I didn't want to use a premade Hugo theme, but when I update anything it just takes two commands to rebuild and upload:

    hugo
    netlify deploy --prod

I'll eventually simplify that further since Netlify can run hugo builds automatically from changes to a git branch.

Beyond that, it's just publish and forget. And the page speed is great (Google scores it at 99) since Netlify is serving it off of a CDN.

[maroonedanchor]

Have you considered self-hosting a Ghost instance?

[wlesieutre]

I did consider it, but I ended up putting a Hugo site on Netlify instead. It's nice to not worry about any database backend or other hosting infrastructure.

With Netlify's continuous deployment system being able to run Hugo builds, I should also be able to hook it up to GitHub so that I can post from an iPad without being able to run hugo locally. Haven't gotten around to that, but I think it'll be a good setup.