Top all-time · #176
Ghost
Company blog · ghost.org/blog · on HN as johnonolanstartupswriting
Ghost is the company blog at ghost.org, writing about startups and writing. Since 2013, 260 different Hacker News readers have linked it 324 times, most often “Ghost 4.0 Released”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 14 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link ghost.org as the open-source, self-hostable blogging platform, often recommended over Medium and WordPress for its simple editor, low cost and built-in Members and monetisation features.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Beautiful, modern publishing with email newsletters and paid subscriptions built-in. Used by Platformer, 404Media, Lever News, Tangle, The Browser, and thousands more.
Most-linked posts?
- Ghost 4.0 Released107 people · 119 mentions · first linked 2013-11-04
- Ghost is a powerful app for professional publishers25 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2014-04-30
- /pricing/18 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2014-02-10
- Ghost15 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2014-01-13
- Ghost 4.07 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-01-13
- /6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-11-04
- /docs/install/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-03-11
- Ghost Membership Software: Sustainable Revenue for Publishers4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-10-23
- /vs/wordpress/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-05-11
- Ghost 43 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-03-16
What Hacker News says?
Ghost (blogging software) chose to incorporate as a Company Limited by Guarantee [1], which doesn't have shares and can't be acquired that way: https://ghost.org/changelog/moving-to-singapore/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_company_limited_by_gua...
Comment linking /changelog/moving-to-singapore/
on “Zoom Acquires Keybase”Submitted Ghost 3.0 as a story · 300 points
HN discussionI'm in love with this. I wish it was a plugin for Ghost[1]. 1. https://ghost.org/
Comment linking /
on “Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear”Submitted Ghost 5.0 as a story · 186 points
HN discussionGhost ( https://ghost.org/ ) is pretty nice. You can host it yourself or pay them to host it for you, either way there is no nag screen.
Comment linking /
on “Medium is a poor choice for blogging”Submitted Ghost for Journalism as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThat's a big difference. I can't use a cheap shared hosting and managing a VPS (os updates, database backups etc) is too much for a small blog. Node.js is fine but it turns out after all these years, php is still the king in crud,blog,cms type of application, which is the 99% of the websites out there. As for the members feature, wordpress has tons of "membership" plugins. Still though, Ghost landing page for member…
Comment linking /members/
on “The Return of the 90s Web”Submitted Ghost 6.0 as a story · 38 points
HN discussion> It's also harder to self host and manage Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go. Plus I consider its Members feature ( https://ghost.org/members/ ) to be a game-changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.
Comment linking /members/
on “The Return of the 90s Web”Submitted Ghost 4 as a story · 38 points
HN discussionhttps://ghost.org for https://davidkunnen.com https://stockevents.app/help https://stockevents.app/blog
Comment linking /
on “What are your most used self-hosted applications?”Submitted Ghost 4.0 Released as a story · 20 points
HN discussionI first heard about it with buffer and ghost https://buffer.com/revenue https://ghost.org/about/ I think buffer also made their various iterations of salary formulas public.
Comment linking /about/
on “My 2 Year Journey to $10K MRR”Submitted Ghost 4.0 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionOpenAI are nobody? Square are nobody? Apple are nobody? Interesting... https://ghost.org/customers/
Comment linking /customers/
on “What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M”Submitted Ghost 4.0 released as a story · 8 points
HN discussionlooks like 8 people total [1]. [1]: https://ghost.org/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M”Submitted Ghost 6.0 as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSince you're in the spotlight now, I want to bring back the discussion on image optimization [1]. Looking at your Features page [2], there are 953KB of images that can be compressed down to 453KB (-47.3%). I genuinely wonder what you can save with better image optimization. [1] https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/941572225890533376 [2] https://ghost.org/features/ [3] https://i.imgur.com/b5OO3Q6.png
Comment linking /features/
on “What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M”Submitted Ghost 4.0 as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThere is Ghost at least: https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost However, it has recently shifted to more limited audience. (payed subscription-based content with different tiers)
Comment linking /
on “WordPress Is in Trouble”Submitted On reaching 5k paying members as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://ghost.org/ perhaps?
Comment linking /
on “WordPress Is in Trouble”Submitted Ghost 4.0 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIf you're in the "medium is still suitable for some use cases" camp, I think you should just use Ghost[1] instead. - great for casual blogging - very cheap to host - monetization tools built-in [1] https://ghost.org/
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on “Medium is not the home for your ideas”Submitted Ghost is now a digital public good as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis seems like a much more polished product, but it seems more targeted as a PaaS for professional content creators. The minimum requirements[0] are pretty high for somebody who just wants to self-host a blog for friends and family: - Ubuntu server with NodeJS / Ngninx installed - 1 GB RAM minimum required - MySQL running somewhere The PaaS "Everything just works" offering is probably more attractive to the "facebo…
Comment linking /pricing/
on “Show HN: Haven – Run a private website to share with only the people you choose”Submitted Ghost 6.0 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNot bad, but for self-hosted blog I would use https://ghost.org/ - much more features and nicer UI.
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Haven – Run a private website to share with only the people you choose”Submitted Explore the Independent Web as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
