from Hacker News

Ghost.org or Substack.com for Blogging?

by romerocarlos on 4/17/24, 12:23 AM with 2 comments

Hi,

I'm looking to start a new blog and I would like someone to please share with me their experience using Ghost.org or Substack.com.

Thank you so much.

Best, Carlos

  • by cebert on 4/17/24, 1:03 AM

    I am trying to blog more this year. After evaluating multiple options, I chose to use Ghost.org. While I know I could self host, I didn’t want the burden of securing web servers in my free time and found Ghost’s pricing model reasonable. Ghost.org also makes email subscriptions easy. My goal is not to monetize or grow a large audience, but to simply share things I’ve learned with a larger audience. I require control of my content, and did not want to force visitors to make an account to read my posts. Ghost allows me to own my data and not force paywalls or ads onto visitors. I didn’t want a Medium.com-like experience.

    If you’re trying to monetize your content Substack is more popular for that currently. Alternatively, if you’re looking for low cost solutions where you are still in control of your content, consider Jekyll or Hugo and hosting static content on GitHub Pages or a CDN/S3.

    As a shameless plug, I’m just starting to get into blogging at https://chrisebert.net. My focus areas are serverless development, observability, and event-driven architectures.