It’s been what like 15 days on Alibaba cloud and Ghost, today just took the site back to cPanel and WordPress. To be very honest I am not comfortable with the new change. I am not very confident when it comes to running self-hosted Ghost on a virtual server. Ghost for blogging is an excellent application but I feel that if something happens I will not be able to control the damage. Just in a few days, I learned a lot but, that is not comfort.
After using Ghost I can now differentiate between WordPress and Ghost. I also started the same way how everyone does by searching on Google WordPress vs Ghost, which is the best blogging application. All of the sites end by saying it depends and both have their pros and cons. What they don’t tell you are the small things that matter big for a normal end user. I will bring out these small things so you can think again about which to choose from two.
Installing Ghost vs WordPress
With most of the hosting accounts, you would get an easy installing option of WordPress they say it is a one-click install. It is not really one-click but if you compare it to installing Ghost it’s way easy. Ghost is tough to install. I went via the official document for installing Ghost but it never worked for me, the only thing that worked for me was to create the Mysql database and user by myself and then tell Ghost CLI what DB and user to use. Ghost needs to ease up on the installation if a person like me is going to take 1 day to install the application, it’s not going to work. WordPress is a clear winner when it comes to installing the application.
Backing up Ghost vs WordPress
You know when you are one or two years down the road of blogs backup is the only security that will give you a good sleep every night. Backing up the complete WordPress site because of its eco-system is way easy compared to Ghost. When starting a blog I am really not concerned about it getting hacked or anything. In the initial days, I need security from myself so that I should not end up breaking the site by doing some update or installation on the command line. Like after installing Ghost I wanted to set up a mail server (which I will talk about next) I was just not comfortable doing that.
Forgot Password (Mail Service)
I use cPanel and shared hosting and every time I press forgot password on WordPress I get mail and a link to reset it. Now, when you are doing this on a virtual server you will not get mail. The first-hand experience let me tell you most of the cloud service providers block port 25 which is for sending mail. Then you will end up looking for SMTP relay providers and using their relay/APIs just so you can get mail when you forget your password. The total time you will spend on deploying this is a total waste because you won’t even know whether what you have done is even secure or not. I don’t know how the managed Ghost service work but as of now WordPress on the cPanel shared hosting is a winner for me.
Blogging vs Server Management
You need to ask yourself do you want to blog or want to manage a server. If you are for blogging and posting then leave the server management or the hosting service to the professionals. Now and then applications get updates and security patches, which patch or upgrade will break your blog and how to fix that will eat your time. You will end up doing server management than putting your time into posts. If managed Ghost or WP solves these issues great if not stick to the basics.
Multiple Sites on a Single Server
If you are like me and want to save money you would also be looking to host multiple sites on a single server. I have 3 currently and soon will be cutting it down to 2, in the future, I want to start another what should I do? If I keep on deploying a server for each site I will end up spending a lot. Again I would now end up doing server management. I know it’s easy to host multiple WP sites on a single server with no mail integration. What about one Ghost and another WordPress or both Ghosts? Let’s start the search on how to do this. When I should be spending time on the content, not server help or how to.
Conclusion WordPress vs Ghost
In the end, I shifted back to WordPress not because Ghost is not good. My reason was the ease of use and simplicity. Ghost is a great application but its eco-system compared to WordPress is small as of now. I would like to see Ghost open up to cPanel shared hosting like WP. Just want simplicity in handling my blog I don’t want to use CLI for everything. Will ask you a simple question and if you can answer it without googling it you know what to do “How do you back up MySQL database, export the database from CLI to your desktop and import it back to a fresh Ghost installation?”
I don’t know and that is how you back up a site. Don’t even know how to do this for WordPress on a self-hosted server but I know there are plugins available for WP that will do this for me. I would like to put one site on Ghost but till the time the eco-system is not big and simplicity is not there I would like to be where I am comfortable. Just in case I am also testing ghost in the meantime and figuring out how everything works, as I still have a server which is paid so hope I learn more.
Must Read: I had to upgrade my server and reset ghost
