Show HN: Unconstrained Ghost Hosting For $25/month
ghosting.dev
ghosting.dev
For $25/m you can get a VPS from Hetzner that has 8vCPU, 16GB mem, 240GB disk, and 20TB traffic.
For $3/m on Heztner you can get a VPS with 20GB disk and 20TB traffic, which is still a 4x multiple for storage and 100x multiple for traffic.
Here I provide free bits of consulting, walk-throughs of all the setup you need to do yourself, handle everything else for you. Not really targeted at experts on HN, but if non-technical friends or family need a blog+site or substack alternative I can help.
I'm not saying this product is as revolutionary, just that there's value in identifying a market and taking a punt. Assuming it's not much work for the OP, it could be a great side hustle, small business, or whatever else. Just because it can be done cheaper with a bit of effort doesn't mean someone won't pay for the convenience.
Just my 2c!
Essentially, the maker thinks their product will fill an unmet need for such customers, many of whom can be found in developing countries [2].
1) The poster has no market plan and is building one on the go.
2) Haven't done any kind of market research.
3) The poster does not seem to have an actual platform built. seems to only have the domain at this stage.
4) Very poor presentation of the product on the site.
5) Does not actually solve the problem the market has. Does not bring anything new to the table.
I have done research on ghost hosting and there is a demand for low end ghost instances but the problem with ghost is its not profitable due to its scalability and management problems at lower scale.
If there are over a 100 people who want this, I'll build out a self service dashboard that automates everything, and get a designer. But I do think it would be idiotic to start this project by hiring a designer and writing thousands of lines of dashboard and automation / system state management code. Doesn't mean I can't do it (have done it professionally enough times).
Regarding it not solving a problem the market has, that may be the case, in which case I'm down a landing page, will think up a new idea next month. But the world is a big place, and the market is bigger than we all think. Would be nice if we could be nicer to people - at the end of the day we're all still normal humans trying to figure out what to do after a pandemic has turned careers upside down. A simple downvote would have been enough.
Even though it’s pretty clear who your target market is, I think technical products cause commenters to roast your product from a technical end user frame, rather than from a non-technical user frame.
Anyway, wishing you the best on your entrepreneurial journey!
This plan covers all the needs of most of our customers, but if your site uses more than 100 GB a month in bandwidth or more than 5 GB of space for your content and images, we'll get in touch with you to charge separately (mostly at-cost) for the extra resources.
> For USD $25 per month, we install and maintain a full featured Ghost install for you with no restrictions (unlimited visitors, unlimited members, unlimited authors/staff)
Claiming absolute no restrictions but then goes on to goes addd a 100 GB bandwidth limitation, which while should be able to handle mild traffic is by no means unlimited. It would be better to call the plan a one with "generous" limits but certainly not unlimited
What would be a good word to convey that there are no artificial constraints, and that the only (soft) limit is the bandwidth you actually use?
I'm not even planning on enforcing the bandwidth, I think it'll even out over everybody for the most part, unless someone is being abusive.
"$25 a month for managed, Ghost optimised hosting that's perfect for 99.9% of websites*
* Think you're in the .1%? Transfer more than 100gb a month (roughly equivalent to X million visits for the average site) and we'll charge you at cost for the overage. This works out to be around $x per x. You can read more about this [here]..."
Or whatever.
Have updated the cap to 1TB as well, realized I could move people off CloudFront to BunnyCDN if they were very high usage.
Ghost is released under the MIT License so, obviously, you don't have to, but I (personally) wouldn't "feel right" pointing any potential customers your way without something along those lines. I'd just send them straight to https://ghost.org (who are hiring folks to work on Ghost).
If I cross $250K a month I think I can commit to something like 15% voluntary royalties. And I'm happy to hire engineers and contribute to Ghost when we're not in the middle of support tickets.
EDIT: I mean $250K a year.
> Ghosting is a colloquial term used to describe the practice of ceasing all communication and contact with a partner, friend, or similar individual without any apparent warning or justification and subsequently ignoring any attempts to reach out or communication made by said partner, friend, or individual.
Think ShellRack was the other option, think .com was available. Ghost In The Shell, so I give you a Shell and maintain a rack of Shells... get it? Seemed a bit of stretch to me.
Happy to take name suggestions, especially if I can find the .com for them.
Once I build the dashboard and fully automate blog creation, and maybe get a discount on CDN, I want to do personal blog hosting at $5 a month. Will maybe limit to 3 writers and ask you to manage your own backups. If anyone wants this plan let me know, I can set you up right now along with the businesses.
Chasing the bottom-feeder market is at best mildly profitable (unless you scale big), but always highly stressful and requires a very disciplined and thick-skinned team.
I'm offering to remove the limit on writers and members, cost is lower, but still secondary.
- who are the biggest non-Ghost ghost hosting companies?
- how would you scale bandwidth costs?
- how will you reach this customer in particular?
- how would you scale support load? the users with the least time and money often have the most requests and need the most help
You might benefit from looking into/reading up on the microconf community, they're the kind of community of bootstrapping types that might help you get more insight on when/how/what to think about.
* bandwidth (BunnyCDN is the best I've found, and they and AWS do private pricing after hitting an aggregate of a couple petabytes a month). Offering yearly plans would help bring in enough cashflow to buy bandwidth options. BunnyCDN allows me good margins at the retail price.
* support load: will likely put in an hourly rate for needy customers, or do the CD Baby / Derek Sivers "buy us a pizza" thing. I'm also okay with helping customers off the system or firing them outright if they're toxic. But ideally will automate whatever gets asked for the most, and offer services from a team for creative work, at hourly rates.
* customer acquisition: put my own blogs on it first (I have a personal blog, and a couple of OSS projects), bring on the companies I used to work for that avoided Ghost because we had 20 people teams and it was too expensive, then go one by one from there. Will get my mom and her embroidery boutique on, then friends with their cooking blogs. If everyone is happy, can evaluate next steps.
I'm bootstrapping as well, but the good news is there's no cost to this (my own blogs will already warrant the baseline infrastructure). So I'd like to think I can take my time with this.
I think it might make sense to at least create two tiers, one with "unlimited" support (where you charge the hourly rate and let them go crazy) and one without. Access to a knowledgebase that you update frequently (as a result of working with customers who had issues) might be available at lower tiers, but at higher tiers it comes with support?
Also the domain and contact email domain being completely different is just plain unprofessional looking
Most people forget the cost of human involvement, my time, and moreover, Ghost.org charge $29 /mo for a limited visit. The only time I'd consider doing something to save $25 /mo would be that I'm publishing all the static HTMLs to, say, an S3 and the worst cast of a downtime is S3 goes down (rare).
Personally, I'd still want to take over if needed but would love your $25 /mo DevOps subscription to the installation. I hope you don't start limiting to constraints such as - 1 domain per subscription! :-)
And best of luck and wishes to your initiative.
There's obviously no way you're getting access to the servers, but Ghost has a fully import / export option already built in. I can also zip up your images / themes etc. for you, so there's no lock-in. Even the domain will continue to be your own nameservers, you'll just point your custom domain to abcd1234.ghosting.dev.
And no, I don't think I'll need to limit the number of domains that point to your installation, but of course you'll want to do that yourself for SEO reasons.
The official Ghost.org do seem high, but I empathize because it does pay the salaries of an international team. But they're so high as to be inaccessible to normal people and companies. An individual writing a blog (especially outside a developed country) or a small company wanting to start a team blog isn't going to pay that much.
Would want to give a portion of revenue to the Ghost non-profit and support development as soon as I get ramen profitable, though, which will probably be happen at 100 to 150 customers.
They'd much rather use your reasonably well priced service. \s
Then I want to give individuals a way to start writing on beautiful blogging software for $5 a month. This bit isn't possible, but will be if I can get a few hundred business customers.
How do you intend to manage the actual Ghost instances: single-tenant or multi-tenant?
I’m assuming customer instances will be run single-tenant—isolated from others, which means with time, different customers will be running slightly different versions of Ghost? I’m I wrong?
Even with multi-tenant, each Ghost installation is its own version, own database and own settings, theme. So they're all independently configurable. I would like to move everyone through versions in lock-step, but I have no objection to letting people trigger their own upgrades (after I have the necessary automation in place).
A multi-tenant setup avoids the pain of maintaining multiple version in production. All multi-tenant customers are on the same server & db versions by design, so any future upgrades can be done for all customers at once. Also, upgrades are expected to be painless (at least in theory) since there is never more than one version in production.
Customers with special needs are hosted as single tenant and of course you get to charge them extra $$$ for this special treatment.
Dunno if you'd call that single or multi tenant, but that's the gist.
I can automate the upgrades and migrations and running them for all the installations at the same time, or leave your installation alone until you ask for an upgrade / migration.