I appreciate the kind offer @airikr@lemmy.ml but no thank you.

I self-hosted Ghost for almost a year via Ghost CLI and it was (1) expensive (2) stressful - especially dealing with potential DDOS attacks and with the newsletter company Mailgun who handles the newsletter part (and would throw me all kinds of random error messages).

Self-hosting Ghost means spending TWICE as much and investing extra hours every month in maintenance.

With Magic Pages I save money and Jannis and his team take care of all the maintenance and updates and respond immediately if I run into any issues.

Yes I don't like Cloudflare but I wouldn't go to these lengths just to avoid it.

Because Ghost now requires Docker and it’s way beyond my scope of expertise (I used to self-host a previous version with Ghost CLI - it will be sunset in the next version).

Ghost is also expensive to self-host, especially the newsletter part. Magic Pages does all the maintenance and updates for me for the price of what I used to pay just for the newsletter integration… and I don’t have to worry about a thing 🥲

Thank you for bringing this up! This is Elena, the author of the blog https://blog.elenarossini.com/.

My Ghost blog is being hosted by Magic Pages... when I signed up last year they had a fully European stack (Bunny CDN) - something that is incredibly important to me.

Recently they moved from BunnyCDN to Cloudflare to keep costs down (prices had skyrocketed). I have no saying in this, but I understand Jannis and his team.

Magic Pages takes care of all the software updates and offers amazing support (plus it would cost me 2x to self-host it... I made the calculations).

And for the record, my personal website - which I self-host - uses BunnyCDN: elenarossini.com

My VPS provider offers automated daily backups (stored in different locations for extra security) for 2.99 a month

+1 for YunoHost from the POV of a total self-hosting newbie (I’m now self-hosting my own GoToSocial, Pixelfed, PeerTube and NextCloud thanks to it… upgrades and backups are super easy, too)

As a mother of an actual human I gotta say $1,500 for a lifetime is a ridiculous figure that wouldn’t even last a week when covering basic necessities (stroller, bedding, diapers, lotion, etc.)