Ghost Hosting on Your Own VPS

Ghost is an open-source (MIT) publishing platform for blogs and online publications, known for its clean editor and fast themes. Choose it with a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install Ghost in about four minutes after boot. You get:

• Ghost 6.73.0 with MySQL 8.0, the database Ghost supports for production.
• An HTTPS address like yourname-x7k2.devoster.app with a Let's Encrypt certificate, serving your site, with Ghost Admin at /ghost.
• Your owner account already created with your Devoster account email and a generated password you can reveal in the dashboard. Ghost's "create your account" setup screen is completed before the site is reachable, so nobody can claim it. The site starts with the title "My Ghost site"; rename it in Settings.
• Staff device verification switched off. Ghost normally emails a code when staff sign in from a new device. That needs outgoing email, which this server doesn't send by default, so it is off; use a strong password instead.
• Dashboard controls to open the site, reset the owner password, restart, stop or start it, read its logs, run an update and connect your own domain.

Ghost is free; you pay only the VPS plan, with 10% off yearly. The server comes with full root, free nightly backups kept 3 days plus one snapshot, a dedicated IPv4, 1 Gbps with unlimited bandwidth and DDoS protection. See the other apps that install this way on the One-Click Apps page.

Outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans. Ghost relies on email for more than newsletters, so until you add a mail service, these do not work:

• Newsletters to your members.
• Member sign-up and sign-in. Ghost signs members in with emailed magic links, so without email nobody can join or log in as a member, and paid memberships can't work either.
• Staff invites. Additional authors and editors are invited by email.
• Forgot-password emails. Reset the owner password from the Devoster dashboard instead.

Out of the box, then, this Ghost is best for a blog or publication without memberships: you write and publish, readers read and subscribe by RSS. To switch the rest on, Ghost needs two kinds of mail:

• Bulk email for newsletters goes through Mailgun, which you configure in Ghost Admin. Ghost talks to Mailgun over its HTTPS API, so the port block doesn't affect it.
• Transactional email (magic links, staff invites, password resets) is set as SMTP in Ghost's server configuration, not in Ghost Admin, and this one-click install doesn't expose that setting yet. Contact support if you need it: it also needs your provider's SMTP submission port, which can be opened on request after approval.

Mailgun and other email providers are paid services with their own terms. If newsletters and paid memberships are the heart of what you want to build, budget for one from the start.

Plenty of Ghost works with no mail service at all:

• The editor: a distraction-free writing view with cards for images, galleries, video, embeds, code and buttons, plus drafts and scheduled posts.
• Themes: Ghost ships with its default theme, and you can upload others or your own from Ghost Admin.
• SEO basics built in: custom meta titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, structured data, social cards, an XML sitemap and RSS feeds.
• Structure: tags, static pages, multiple authors (once you can invite them) and code injection for site-wide scripts.
• APIs: Ghost's Content API lets you use it as a headless CMS for a separate front end.

Two Ghost 6 features are not set up on this install: the ActivityPub "Network" features and Ghost's native web analytics. For traffic numbers, a cookie-free option is our one-click Umami server, added to your theme with Ghost's code injection.

Add your domain in the Devoster dashboard and create the DNS record it shows: a CNAME to your devoster.app name for a subdomain such as blog.example.com, or an A record to the server's IP for a root domain such as example.com. The panel checks the DNS, issues the certificate and switches Ghost's site URL over, so links, the sitemap and canonical tags use your domain.

Two things change once the domain is connected:

• The devoster.app address redirects to your domain. Old links keep working; they just land on the new address.
• Ghost Admin only works on the main address. Sign in at https://your-domain/ghost. Ghost only accepts admin logins on its configured site URL, which is why the old address redirects instead of serving a second copy.

Connect the domain before you publish widely, so search engines and social shares pick up the final address from the start.

Ghost and MySQL together use roughly 300 to 365 MB of RAM at idle. Ghost renders pages on the server, so traffic spikes and image uploads (which Ghost resizes) are what use the rest.

Micro is the plan we recommend: the extra gigabyte is the difference between a traffic spike being slow and being a problem. For readers worldwide, a CDN in front of the site helps more than a bigger plan, since the server is in Utah. You can upgrade from the panel later. Choosing between Ghost and other ways to run a blog? Our guide to hosting for bloggers compares the options.

We test new Ghost versions and apply them in a maintenance hour you choose, or when you press Update now. A snapshot of the VPS is taken first, and if Ghost doesn't come back healthy the server is rolled back automatically. Themes you upload are yours to keep compatible: before a major Ghost version, check your theme supports it, and turn auto-update off until it does.

Ghost is open-source software released under the MIT licence by the Ghost Foundation. Devoster is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ghost; we install the open-source release on a server you rent. The server is unmanaged: you have full root, and its security and your content are your responsibility. We don't provide help with Ghost itself; Ghost's documentation and forum cover themes and settings.

When is this the wrong choice? If you want newsletters and paid memberships without running a mail service yourself, a hosted Ghost service or a different platform fits better. If you'd rather not run a server at all, look at our WordPress hosting instead. Nightly backups (3 days) cover the whole VPS; export your content from Ghost Admin regularly and keep a copy off the server.