Good morning HN! John from Ghost here - Thanks for all your support over the last 5 years. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that very first blog post hitting the #1 spot of HN and getting so much attention back in 2012. That was the very first time anyone ever heard about Ghost, and everything we've built since then has been thanks to that.
We use hosted Ghost for our blog. For the most part, it's been great.<p>My biggest complaint is that Ghost doesn't yet have a built in SSL/TLS option (e.g. Let's Encrypt). Their recommendation is to use Cloudflare. It's fine for hobbyist or personal blogs, but as a corporation it's basically prevented us from using SSL.<p>We're in a regulated industry and need to do appropriate vetting of vendors. Onboarding a blog platform is very, very easy because of the relatively low risk nature of a blog. Onboarding an infrastructure vendor, like Cloudflare, is very complicated. Making it more complicated is we'd have no interest in actually paying for a Cloudflare service so it's impossible to get resources to complete the vetting process. On top of all of that, last year's Cloudbleed incident cast some real doubt on Cloudflare's security practices and ability to properly protect potentially sensitive data.<p>We will likely eventually self-host so we can get proper SSL support. I'm really disappointed by this since it will be more expensive than paying our Ghost subscription for several years.
Thanks for the post, its great to hear that Ghost is doing well - I love using it.<p>> [Github] has become too transactional - more support tool than collaboration<p>I strongly agree with this. I wish Github "Issues" were relabeled "Comments" and need not be "Open" or "Closed". Issues need action, comments do not. I've been burned many times now by solving someone's issue and then finding out they use my code for their business and just wanted free support from me.
I was a Ghost user for ~3 years (from Jan 2014 to the best part of 2016) and eventually switched to WordPress. I loved Ghost minimalism and its usage of Markdown, but there were several issues that made it a no-no. I was kinda sad to let it go actually.<p>I took the time to write to the Ghost support email with my thoughts on the switch and my main issues (namely no categories, lack of i18n, editor live-view performance with many images, no search -- this was middle 2016, maybe they have these features now but they didn't then)<p>They took the trouble of answering my email, I found it rather nice.
I would love to switch to hosted ghost, but the pricing makes very little sense for a personal blog. An article will make the front page of hn or some larger subreddits and I'll get 30k views in just a few hours. I'd have to pay close to $200/mo to get the same number of page views I can get with a $10/VPS that I ssh into maybe once every 6 months to patch.<p>The pricing levels simply do not offer enough page views.
Congratulations on your 5th aniversary :)<p>I was a backer in the kickstarter campaign, but various "issues" eventually led me to look elsewhere.<p>Ghost is (was?) rather good, but the thing that ultimately sold me on it back on kickstarter was the much hyped dashboard, which never made it.<p>Before Docker it was a pain to manage dependencies and keep everything up to date, but with the official Docker image, things got better - until a flurry of almost daily releases to the 1.x branch made it a chore again.<p>The final nail in the coffin was dropping PostgreSQL support. While it wouldn't be much of an issue if starting on a clean host, with a clean slate, i run all of my other stuff in PostgreSQL, and i much prefer to only administer/backup one DMBS.<p>I'm currently on Hugo, and i really miss the online editing/publishing from Ghost.
> The stuff which is actually hard, nobody ever asks about. For instance: How do you know when someone is in a bad mood? How do you deal with loneliness? How do you foster camaraderie? How do you achieve urgency? How do you ever get to know people outside of work when you never spend time with them outside of work?<p>I for one would love to hear more from the Ghost team on how they approach solving these very essential problems - any insight is welcome!
> <i>The best marketing we've done has been to launch, over and over again.</i><p>That's my favorite takeaway from the article. Seems like a difficult thing to do in practice, but also something I've been considering lately.<p>Anyone else have experience with doing repeated launches that they'd be willing to share?
> We wanted to know: What would it look like if you built a technology startup which could not make anyone rich. If you eliminated all the promises of wealth from the roadmap up front, and tried to build a good company, how would that affect the product, business, customers, and every little decision in between?<p>...<p>> We're currently looking at testing an affiliate program whereby we'll pay out a 30% commission every single month on the lifetime revenue of anyone referred to Ghost(Pro).<p>...<p>I believe this is called colocating your money and your mouth. I'm inspired.
I was on board from the beginning! What a great product. Too bad they dropped support for Postgres at some point, otherwise it would still be my platform of choice!
> Our biggest marketing failure has been our documentation and resources. ... We're actually <i>hiring right now</i> for someone to help us fix this and make using Ghost a really fantastic developer experience.<p>Putting user docs as part of a <i>marketing</i> role is not lining things up for a good result. :(<p>How about putting it under <i>engineering</i> instead?
All I got to say is that Hannah Wolfe is a beast (in a really good way!).<p>Check out her number of commits compared to other contributors: <a href="https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/TryGhost/Ghost" rel="nofollow">https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/TryGhost/Ghost</a><p>Keep up the good work guys!
After the cell provider selling location article, this was a much needed encouraging read. Thanks for sharing and good luck Ghost in your next 5 years!
> How do you pay people if they live in different countries? What about contracts? — The things people ask about most often all have straightforward answers.<p>Really? I just read a comment from the CEO of HashiCorp who has a very different take:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563</a><p>Unless all remote employees of Ghost are just contractors...
I've been rereading this article for days. Thanks so much for taking the time to share the sorts of insights that rarely see light.<p>My company is looking into our options as to what sort of structure would be best. We've considered being a worker-owned cooperative, a B Corporation, an a non-profit. We have the same goals of developing the best products we can an never selling out.<p>I wonder if you had any insight or suggestions on where to learn more about these options and the consequences. What do non-profits offer to funders? Everybody wants equity.
I remember looking for better alternatives for WordPress(i felt they alienated the bloggers largely) and came across an article about Ghost. I was instantly hooked to the whole thing to this day. I just wish the non hosted versions get a better way to update to the latest version as well as a (official) script to automate the install easily.
I signed up for ghost when it was at its kickstarter phase.
I was very excited by the promise. A year later there were still long winded discussions taking place on their github issues on how they should tackle responsive images.
There were alot of JS hacks around to overcome their missing features. I lost interest over time
I didn't realize Ghost was a non-profit. Very noble. The feedback in Github is interesting. Ghost is probably more likely to have issues with demanding users than, say, mongodb.<p>Very cool and inspiring post. That said:<p>- Ghost's marketing materials tend to outright lie to users when making comparisons to WordPress or other platforms.<p>- I dislike OSS projects that hide their OSS nature. Why does a user need to pay $29/mo for an entry level blog? Why isn't there any obvious mention of the OSS nature of the project on the pricing page, home page, or features page?<p>- What's been done about the memory issues? Last time I tried ghost, it was a bit of a memory hog.
I've nothing but a positive experience using the self-hosted Ghost instance for some clients. Glad to see this transparency and that they're doing well.
Ghost is looking dated today with those templates and their script tags. Technically speaking, today, I'd rather use Gatsby as a Wordpress front-end.
I'm a little surprised to read that Ghost doesn't use gitlab. Given the companies are both open source and distributed work forces; not to mention they call out github as a big headache.<p>>How open source works is: If you want something, you can build it.