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Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

Wordpress is plug and play on almost any webhost out there (some even have installers for it). Ghost is node.js which is barely supported by webhosting companies (you will most likely need a VPS or some specific node.js HaaS, at least).

How will this not be a huge barrier to achieve the same traction Wordpress has?

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This already came up on their forum: http://ghost.org/forum/installation/23-is-there-a-quick-star...

It WILL be a huge barrier. It think Ruby was one (of many) reason(s) Diaspora* never took off. RoR is mainstream compared to Node.js. In my opinion Node is a wacko choice for a non-profit company looking to create a broad appeal blogging software which will be a real alternative to WordPress.

No, the lack of interest from hosting providers wasn't why ruby failed. It's due mostly to performance issues, some of which are due to its design and some of which are due to its implementation.

However with Ruby 1.9 - 2.0 (2.1 will support generational gc, finally) the performance of Ruby (with ORM and non-c frameworks, like phalcon and Yaf) is drawing close to parity with PHP.[1] I think that what drove diaspora's failure is the lack of people who truly care to run their own nodes. There's a pretty steep "cost of acquisition" to get a single diaspora user.

[1]: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7...

Wait, Ruby is actually slower than PHP? So whenever some webdev laughs at me for using PHP and points me to that "A fractal of bad design" article, I can just laugh back and say "Well, at least my language is faster!"? Amazing.

Ruby, as generally served with Rails, has historically been much slower than SQL-in-the-page PHP with APC/etc.

One example[1], from 37 Signals back in 2009, showed a 320ms response time (gack!) with 9,000 requests per minute on 10 4vcpu/4gb VMs in a private cluster.

Assuming they had a reasonably tuned storage subsystem, this is pretty terrible performance. That's about 150 requests per second for 10 VMs with 40 vcpus and 40gb RAM. However, that doesn't quite match up with the 320ms claim, which would have them pushing a little lower. I'll assume a rounding error.

Things have gotten better in many cases, but hardware and scaling up and out is still the best way to improve rails performance.

[1] https://37signals.com/svn/posts/1819-basecamp-now-with-more-...

I don't think I could find a better summary for why rails was bad for a CMS than that post. You could do much better with ruby but until some more killer non-rails ruby web apps are written, ruby's reputation will be inseparable from that of rails.

One of the last complaints anyone has had about PHP is that it's slow. PHP's main competitors have only recently begun to catch up in terms of speed, and the future of PHP is looking like it's going to remain competitive and near/in the lead.

It shouldn't aim to be Wordpress, because it won't be easily deployable on shared hosting. If you look at how Tumblr is commonly used to power blogs, I think this could be similar, but obviously more fragmented unless there's one big host that becomes the de facto standard.

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