I couldn't afford $5/mo for Ghost Pro so I built one for $2/mo on a $4,000/mo VPS
Tags: webdev, javascript, programming, supabase
Published: 2024-07-16 20:05:09

Children, this is the story of "How I Met Your M̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ .... no Ghost"

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/wuu5uvbbem3bnowxvh1z.gif)



So, this story starts with the usual problem present everywhere , I know, Poverty. So, right now I have graduated from my college and was working on my startup doshare.me living in the spare room of my parent's house. For over a year I looked for tech based jobs on various platforms including Linkedin, Glassdoor and Indeed during the global financial slowdown and seasons of layoffs that's when I started on "file based service for reorganization" i.e changing the way buisnesses interact with files. But that would be a story for next decade.

This one's for this weekend. Since, all the SEO services, marketing and discoverability start with a blog, we at Doshare, got our go-to blog on Ghost Pro. After 1 Month of Free Trial and sending a "reinstating" email to ghost support team(cause card declined ofc.). We knew we couldn't pay $11/mo for Plausible Analytics and $5 for Ghost Pro then paying Monthly Infrastructure Costs for AWS, Cloudflare Workers, R2 and Render. We needed to cut costs so we did what any other (totally!) reasonable engineer would do. Setup the blog on a VPS using docker. So, like aaanyyy other reasonable engineer we started out, where ever we could get free credits.

And then this occurred. IBM gave free $1000 IN VPC credits. After exhausting every free credit limit on AWS and Render. It was time to move to IBM cloud.


Simply installing docker and setting up a single instance of Ghost for our blog at blog.doshare.me . Then I realized many people are required to host their own instance on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet(or similarly priced VPS on AWS, Azure etc.).

While setting up Ghost using Docker on server. I thought it would be great to have a WebUI over the Docker that could deploy as many websites I want for each of my side projects with a simple URL setup via cname. So, taking inspiration from Vercel's UI (or Next.js idk much of a Vue person really). But, I wanted to learn Nextjs and work on a project using Supabase - what's supabase? you ask? it's this Awesome Open Source Firebase alternative for building Apps. And recently, it went into GA - General Availability, which also means they have made it less buggy for this type of project or any.

So, I left everything I was doing(I wasn't doing anything), and got started with this Nextbase Starter from GitHub. Encountered some errors, did rigourous Testing, Wake up late. Sleep (a little) for 2 week. First week I hoped, I would be able to ship by end of week. But that was my overambitious self. it's okay(sobs on localhost:3000) .Let's say it, "I am Batman" (in ben afleck's voice). OKAY, you got me I might have designed (or not) a theme named Batmobile for Ghost back when I was tinkering with building Custom Ghost Themes.

After 2 weeks on 14 June starting from 1 June it was finally completed with Payment Integration using Razorpay's Gateway. It was live for 2 days, I launched it on YC News and then Razorpay.(because they don't support business web hosting)

Remember it's BYOSD (that's short for Bring Your Own Sub-Domain)

Now, it's down again. So, that's great for an effort?

Now that my ramp is over here it is time for stating that I have made website free for now until I figure out a Payment Platform so you can try it out. Enjoy, GT out! (mic drop🎤)

Enjoy The Free Brunch Here :> [Login](https://shedtheshade.com/login) - [SignUp](https://shedtheshade.com/sign-up)

PS: Now I have to pay $7000 and $72 on AWS plus whatever Cloudflare for SaaS bills.

[Original Post](https://blog.shedtheshade.com/i-couldnt-afford-5-mo-for-ghost-pro-so-i-built-one-for-2-mo-on-a-4-000-mo-vps/)