Ghost is one of the fastest-growing publishing platforms. However, for those looking to dip their toes in the water, one aspect can be off-putting: th

Host a Ghost Blog for Free on Fly.io — In 1 Minute — The Autodidacts

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2022-05-18 05:00:05

Ghost is one of the fastest-growing publishing platforms. However, for those looking to dip their toes in the water, one aspect can be off-putting: the shiny Ghost(Pro) hosting starts at $11/month or $108/year — $300/year a year if you want to use your own theme — and even if you self-host on a VPS that will set you back around $5/month or $60 a year1

For years, I have hosted this blog on Heroku’s free tier. It was a bit involved to get set up, and the in-depth tutorial I wrote still gets traffic. However, when Ghost phased out PostgreSQL support, and Heroku changed their free tier, it became much more difficult.2

A little while ago, I ran across Fly.io on HackerNews. It looked like it could run Ghost, and has a generous free tier. When it came time to find a better home for my Ghost blogs, I decided to give it a shot. There are several good tutorials out there, and the process only took about half an hour. I was happy. But what if the process took 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes?

Here is a single copy-and-pasteable command3 that will spin up a fully functional Ghost blog on Fly.io in less than two minutes4:

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