For the past 6yrs, I've used Orchard CMS to host my personal blog. It's been hosted on Cloudzy.com on a shared instance. Between the Windows Server 2016 hosting, my domain name, and the email hosting it was costing around €250/yr.
I didn't mind too charge per year too much as I always viewed it as a way to advertise myself. In fact, down through the years people have commented before how it helped my get work as I was a lot more 'visible' than other potential candidates that I was up against.
However, my one pet peeve was that I was my responsibility to keep Orchard CMS, my Windows Server as well as all the apps to help keep things ticking over like the rather excellent Certify The Web up to date.
As I get older, the days of having evenings all to myself are long gone. I simply don't have the time any more to keep things as up to date as I once had.
Why Orchard in the first place?
Good question! I started out using BlogEngine.net way back in the late 2000's. This was a fantastic blog platform if you wanted a blog that was built using ASP.NET. The choices at the time were a little limited.
As time went on, there were more and more flashier blog platforms emerging that were built with .NET, offering even greater flexibility. One of those was Orchard CMS, now called Orchard Core.
Orchard was and still is an excellent CMS. Blogging is only a tiny fraction of what this platform can do. Orchard does everything from single page applications to full-blown ecommerce. There's a very active community and it's constantly being developed.
At the start of this year, I decided I would take a look around to see how the landscape had shifted and to see if there were other options around that I could use.
Exploring the blogging landscape
Today there are so many options to choose from. Wordpress still dominates. I very nearly decided to use Wordpress myself due to the sheer number of themes and plugins available but finding reasonably prices hosting proved a little tricky.
Orchard CMS had morphed into Orchard Core. I could have ported my blog over to use this but it was not going to help me reduce the burden of my hosting issues. There is an Orchard Core hosting platform called https://dotnest.com but if I wanted to use my own custom domain, it would cost roughly €300/yr.
In fact, many of the blog hosting options available today seem to have settled on €20/m for their pricing by the time you factor in using your own domain, making sure you can send emails, or use a custom domain.
And then there was Ghost
During my research, I looked a little more into Ghost. What grabbed me initially was how clean and minimalist the editor was compared to others. It's pretty white and empty until you need the tools to format or upload images. Everything just seems to get out of the way so your words can do the heavy lifting.
I decided to hop over to ThemeForest to see if there were any modern looking themes. The themes were pricey at €60-90 but factoring in the time it would save me to just re-use a well thought out theme, it was a no brainer for me.
After settling on the theme I wanted (this one), the next hurdle was hosting to consider.
Hosting Dilemma
One of the things that makes Ghost a bit unique is how it's geared towards the idea of your blog having subscribers and/or payment tiers. This is great for those travelling influencers with thousands of followers but for me with, if I'm lucky, tens of viewers, the official Ghost hosting options seemed overkill.
I was initially going to go with Digital Ocean but the cost was looking similar to my current setup. As I was still uncertain as to how much emailing I'd need to do, I decided to keep things experimental and decided to use a provider called PikaPods.com.
PikaPods will look after the servers, along with keeping Ghost up to date. The pricing is extremely reasonable too which was great to start out. Some of the reviews on Reddit mention that stability might be a concern but for roughly €5/m I was willing to give it a go.
The main thing I'm missing is a decent mail provider. Ghost is setup to easily integrate with Mailgun.org which is great but Mailgun's plans aren't exactly the cheapest. For now I'm on their free plan which is quite restrictive but suits my needs.
If things grow and take off, I've already spotted another Ghost specific publisher called MagicPages.co that have really great plans, including mail. They even have a lifetime subscription service too which looks great if you plan on blogging for a few years. So I've options if things pick up here.
Migration
Unfortunately, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Migrating a blog with hundreds of posts was a bit of a pain.
I was able to copy/paste the content from Orchard Core into the editor in Ghost but that convenience came at the cost that all my images were still pointing to my old CDN URLs that used my Windows Server.
It wasn't tricky to re-upload the images to Ghost but it was extremely time-consuming.
Summary
Now that everything is moved over to PikaPods and Ghost my yearly costs are looking more like €75/yr. It did cost a one off fee for the theme but it should be more economical to run my blog on Ghost than via a Windows Server.
Who knows, maybe in a few years PikaPods will host Orchard Core blogs and I can move back to that platform again!
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