Managed Ghost Hosting — production-ready from $15 a month
Open-source publishing platform for blogs, newsletters, and membership sites. Deployed on your own dedicated instance in AWS, Azure, or GCP, kept patched, backed up, and monitored by ManageStacks — standard Ghost, no lock-in.
Ghost is a self-hosted publishing platform for professional blogs, newsletters, and membership sites with built-in payments. ManageStacks deploys Ghost with MySQL, Mailgun integration, and managed TLS pre-configured.
What does Ghost do, and why do teams deploy it?
Ghost is an open-source alternative to WordPress, Substack, and Medium designed specifically for professional publishing. It provides a distraction-free editor, built-in SEO, newsletter delivery, member management with free and paid tiers, Stripe-powered payments, and a themeable frontend — all in a focused platform that prioritizes content creation and audience growth.
The platform includes a powerful editor with markdown shortcuts, rich media embeds, dynamic cards (callouts, toggles, bookmarks, galleries), and reusable content snippets. Ghost's membership system handles signups, paid subscriptions via Stripe, email newsletters to segmented audiences, and analytics dashboards showing revenue, engagement, and growth metrics. The Theme API and Content/Admin APIs enable custom frontends, headless CMS architectures, and third-party integrations.
ManageStacks deploys Ghost with MySQL for content and member data, SMTP or Mailgun integration for newsletter delivery, S3-compatible storage for images and media, and managed TLS. Publish content, grow your audience, and collect subscription revenue — all on your own infrastructure without platform fees or algorithmic content suppression.
- Distraction-free editor with markdown, cards, and rich media embeds
- Built-in membership system with free and paid tiers
- Stripe-powered subscription payments with zero platform commission
- Newsletter delivery with audience segmentation and analytics
- SEO-optimized with structured data, sitemaps, and canonical tags
- Themeable frontend with the Handlebars Theme API
Open-source publishing platform for blogs, newsletters, and membership sites
Ghost as a self-hosted alternative to WordPress, Substack and Medium
Instead of paying per-seat fees to a SaaS vendor, teams self-host Ghost to keep full control of their data and infrastructure. ManageStacks removes the operational overhead — you get the cost and privacy benefits of open source with the reliability of a managed platform.
What does managed Ghost hosting cost?
Flat per-app pricing, in your chosen AWS, Azure, or GCP region. No per-user pricing — a busy deployment costs the same as a quiet one.
Starter
Staging and internal tools. Dedicated instance, TLS, daily backups, managed upgrades.
Standard
Production workloads. Adds monitoring, staging environment, region choice, priority support.
Business
High-traffic and compliance workloads. Adds a high-availability replica and same-day support.
24×7 SRE retainer
Round-the-clock on-call across every hosted application, for teams that need a pager answered at 3am.
When is self-hosting Ghost the right answer instead?
“Managed hosting is not always the correct call.”
Self-host when a platform team already runs the infrastructure and on-call rotation to operate Ghost at genuinely low marginal cost. Self-host when compliance requires an air-gapped or on-premises deployment that no hosted option can satisfy. And self-host when the deployment depends on heavy customisation with a fast internal build-deploy loop, because an internal release process will beat any managed change process.
For everyone else — teams whose engineers have better things to do than shepherd upgrades — managed hosting is cheaper than the hours it replaces.
Which cloud should Ghost run on — AWS, Azure or GCP?
For most workloads, the choice of cloud matters less than proximity: run Ghost in the same cloud and region as the applications and data it talks to, because every request between them adds a round trip. The underlying compute performs equivalently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In practice, an existing cloud footprint decides it. All plans support all three clouds, and moving regions later is a scheduled migration, not a rebuild.
Deepest managed-service catalog, default when there's no existing footprint
Best fit for teams already on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID
Strongest for data/analytics-adjacent workloads
Every plan supports AWS, Azure, and GCP — region choice included.
Common questions about Ghost on ManageStacks
What is Ghost on ManageStacks used for?
Ghost is a self-hosted publishing platform for blogs, newsletters, and membership sites. ManageStacks deploys and maintains it so you can focus on writing and audience growth without managing servers or database administration.
Can Ghost replace WordPress or Substack?
Yes. Ghost provides a focused publishing experience with a modern editor, built-in memberships, newsletter delivery, and SEO — without WordPress's plugin complexity or Substack's platform fees. You keep 100% of subscription revenue (minus Stripe's processing fee).
Does Ghost support paid memberships on ManageStacks?
Yes. Ghost integrates with Stripe for subscription payments. You can offer free, paid, and complimentary membership tiers. ManageStacks deploys Ghost with the full membership system — signups, payments, email delivery, and member analytics.
Can I use Ghost as a headless CMS?
Yes. Ghost provides Content and Admin REST APIs that allow you to use any frontend framework (Next.js, Gatsby, Nuxt, Astro) while Ghost handles content management, memberships, and newsletter delivery as the backend.
How does Ghost handle newsletters on ManageStacks?
Ghost includes a built-in newsletter system that sends posts to members as emails. ManageStacks configures SMTP or Mailgun for reliable delivery. You can segment audiences by membership tier, engagement, and custom labels.
Other devtools tools on ManageStacks
Run Ghost without carrying the pager
Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace. We handle provisioning, SSL, monitoring, backups, updates, and security. From $15/mo.