A short guide to running Ghost in a production environment and setting it up to serve traffic at scale.
Ghost(Pro)
The most efficient way to deploy a production-ready instance of Ghost is on our official fully-managed PaaS. Ghost(Pro) runs the exact same open source codebase and has no limitations compared to self hosting. It's the easiest way to save a lot of time installing and managing your environment.
| Ghost(Pro) | Self-Hosting | |
|---|---|---|
| 🎛 Product features | Identical | Identical |
| 🖥 Managed install & setup | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🔄 Automatic weekly updates | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🚧 Server maintenance & backups | ✅ | ❌ |
| ⚠️ Threat & uptime management | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🔒 SSL Certificate | Automatic | Manual |
| 🌍 Worldwide CDN included | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🥊 Enterprise-grade security | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🚑 Customer Support | Priority Email Support | Community Support |
| ❤️ Helps to fund all future development of Ghost software |
✅ | ❌ |
Self-hosting
For self-hosting Ghost in production our officially recommended stack is:
- Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04
- MySQL 5.5, 5.6, or 5.7 (not >= 8.0)
- NGINX
- Systemd
- Recommended Node version installed via NodeSource
- A server with at least 1GB memory
- A non-root user for running
ghostcommands
Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 are the only officially supported operating systems. Our Ubuntu install guide walks you through how to get a server setup this way.
Other operating systems may work fine and you're welcome to use them, but we are unable to assist with debugging or optimising for them at present - so you're on your own there. Our recommendation: Use Ubuntu, because that's where you'll have the fewest headaches.
Selecting a webhost
You can use just about any hosting provider which provides a reasonable VPS to work with. Ghost officially partners with Digital Ocean, who also offer a pre-made Ghost image. We recommend them very highly.