Ask HN: Ghost vs. Wordpress | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Ghost vs. Wordpress

8 pointstlong6 comments

I'm creating a new blog and wondering if I should make the jump from WP to Ghost. I've done some node development before, but I'm by no means an expert.

I like the looks and speed of Ghost, but is it stable and reliable enough for production?

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I've been using Ghost for about a year to host my blog. I'm paying for Ghost Pro, which is their hosting and I'm using the default theme (called Casper). The only modifications I've made is to add Disqus comments to the end of my posts.

So far I'd say it works great and is only getting better as they release more and more features. That being said it still isn't as feature rich as other blogging platforms (like not having a post scheduling feature), but it's getting there.

I like their philosophy and how beautiful they make things by default.

You can check out what the default theme looks like on my blog: http://www.samuelmandell.com

My blog http://blog.higg.im/ sits on a private NGINX server and is proxied with a CDN to address traffic spikes. I used to think my blog didn't get that much traffc and a CDN seemed like overkill. I never liked serving a site from the raw Apex IP because it's too easy to boot offline (DDOS'd).

I wrote about this setup on the blog:

"Why I run this blog on MaxCDN and Ghost"

http://blog.higg.im/2015/02/10/why-i-run-this-blog-on-maxcdn...

And very worth it getting a site off the apex too:

http://blog.higg.im/2014/03/10/getting-jque-re-off-the-apex/

It depends greatly on what you want your blog to do.

If you just want to publish articles (no comments or any other dynamic features), use something like Jekyll. Otherwise, just use whichever you're most comfortable with, either WP or Ghost. It really won't make any technical difference to you. The major differences will be how easy it is for you to use, so pick the one that seems easiest.

Ghost seems to work very well. I've never used it on a super high traffic site, but there's no reason to think it would fall over. It's definitely not as CPU or memory efficient as WordPress can be, but that just means you'll need a bigger server for the equivalent site.

Given the fact you're asking this question, I'm thinking you're probably not ready to move to Ghost for your blog. Stay with what you're familiar with until you get a chance to tinker with ghost in a sandbox environment.

Wordpress has a larger ecosystem. Ghost's been around for quite a while now, I think they're both reliable. They're probably the two best choices, so either one of them is fine.

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