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Comment by sudhirj | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, there's it's not world changing or anything. The problem I want to solve is that the Ghost(Pro) offering gets expensive really quickly - I want to give small teams and small businesses all over the world a way to start a small site or team blog for $25 without worrying about head count or visitor count suddenly costing them a bomb.

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.

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IOW, you are consciously competing with Ghost(Pro)’s lowest plan $29/mo, which I have no problem with.

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?

That's right. The server will be multi-tenant by default, unless you're a celebrity of some sort. Ghost is super fast, and under load you're mostly stressing nginx. I start with the bigger instances on AWS, and I've load tested them pretty heavily for multi-tenant.

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).

I’m a bit confused by the opening sentence of your second paragraph. Perhaps we are using multi-tenant to describe slightly different things.

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.

Replying the nested comment, my current approach is to put multiple Ghost installations on one big AWS server. Each Ghost installation has its own codebase and database, so they're very independent of each other, with upgrades and migrations all happening independently.

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.

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