Writing a Blog ? Don't use Wordpress. Use Ghost instead. It is free

So are you shocked ? Yes I didn't believed it either. And that's why I launched my first blog on wordpress 4 months ago.My first consideration was I have no money so I will use the lowest price possible and when I make some money I will think about switching. So I read wordpress is free and I just need a free vps. And I got one from Oracle. I will write about all those things in separate blogs. And after 4 months I finally pulled the plug and switched to ghost in the same free oracle server. Now why ? There must be some reason behind why Apple, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, The Stanford Review, Mozilla are using ghost to publish their blogs. This will not be a very enriching post. I will revisit this post later

WordPress

Don't get me wrong , wordpress is great. It does almost everything and that's why it is okay to use Wordpress if you are a web developer or have a budget to hire one. But if you just want to publish a blog in wordpress I can guarantee you that you will be spending much more time optimising the website rather than publishing your posts. That is the problem of wordpress It is bloated for a blog.

Also you know 40% of the websites run on wordpress so it receives a huge amount of attack from attackers who try to take over you site by using plugin vulnerability or other security loopholes.

I literally got DDOSed the day I launched my first blog. I successfully managed that and learned a lot of things but man that was bad day.

Also there is a plugin update and your site breaks, there is a problem in your site- you install a plugin to fix that, now another plugin doesn't work. Site works in one device doesn't work in other device is. I faced a lot of that and that is why I am telling you that wordpress may seem cheaper at first but it will drain your money if you don't know what you are doing , and even if you do know, it is going to cost you a lot of money which you didn't see coming.

Why ghost then

Ghost is relatively new and based on node.js so it is fast I mean wicked fast. Not php like wordpress. Wordpress can be fast too, but you need three plugins for that. Also ghost is meant for only one thing that is blogging. Just trying to do one thing good and does it beautifully. It automatically give you the options to optimize for search result. Publishing a post is also breeze.

When I first started I didn't know that ghost was a open source platform. But later I find out that it is a open source platform. If you don't want to get into setting up your own server you can go to ghost website take their Pro plans (starts from 9.99 dollar/month). that comes with ghost ready to go for you, just write and publish. But if you want you can maintain your own server for Ghost and that will be cheaper for you.

If you don't know much about servers but still want to install Ghost on your own server to save some money you can go to with digitalocean and they will provide you a free installed ghost server starting price 6 dollar/month (as of today). I will write a separate blog about that.

I have written the blog about hosting ghost for completely free here.

If you do not want to pay at all you can also do that. Ghost does provide a complete guide in their website to do that. But I couldn't do it in that way, it is hard. So I installed cloudpanel, a free open source software in my free Oracle server ( 3 cpu core and 24 GB ram) and installed ghost using cloudpanel. It is much easier that way. Cloudpanel ( cloudpanel.io ) provides their installation guide on Oracle cloud as well as their installation guide for ghost. In this way you can install ghost in any cloud in stands not only Oracle. I use Oracle because their free tier is very generous for. I plan to write blog posts about setting up free tier account in Oracle cloud(4 free servers), Free vpns both openvpn and wireguard, pihole ad blocking, uptime kuma, Basic simple website, wordpress and ghost sites all. And keep in mind that if I can do all this you will also be able to do everything.

In conclusion I must say that it is my first tech blog and it is bad. I just needed to vent out my frustrations about wordpress. So I wrote this to inform you that you can get a good blog experience free of cost without using wordpress and using ghost. I will document all the processes later. That's it for today. Thanks for reading this far. Nope you have a nice day. Bye.