[Answered] How does Ghost perform on HelioHost? Any first impressions?

[badrihippo]

I just realised there's a (sort of) official way to install Ghost on HelioHost! I've also noticed some other people using it here. Just wondering what your impressions were?

 

I don't mean this to be a "help" thread, so feel free to share anything about the experience. Does it load up reasonably quickly? Any risk of overloading the server (à la Wordpress)?

 

I set up a sort of "guerilla Ghost" before I realised it could be run here: software on Heroku, database on HelioHost, and the public-facing website hosted on Netlify via Gridsome (the static site generator). So Ghost is used as the backend, with all the dashboard and integrations, and the final site is rendered as a static site by Gridsome. Now that Ghost 3 is out, along with it's "memberships" feature, I'm wondering whether to make the switch and install everything here. At least, until I save up for a VPS.

 

I heard that the "app" (or whatever it's called) gets powered down after 5 minutes and takes time to start up again: is that a reasonable delay, or a bad idea? The situation is similar with Heroku free hosting, and it doesn't take noticeably longer for the first load (especially for me, with my bad internet connection ). The only problem is when trying to access the JSON API: I get a "Ghost is still starting, please wait..." message in the JSON, which means I have to make sure the server's running before I make any API calls.

 

[Edit: I hope this is the right forum to post this! Should it have gone into "General Discussion > Website Management and Coding" instead? ]

Edited April 11, 2020 by badrihippo

[Guest yikes]

I've used Ghost on here before. It's cool, but since it's not up to date and I have no proven way to correctly update it, I don't know how the latest version would run. Honestly, the downtime is the only thing that is off-putting with the software. Otherwise it works as intended and should be used in place of WP and possibly Joomla

[Seekier]

Ghost is what I am using presently. I was able to get it setup and running with the help of @krydos, thanks to him. But you will still need external cron jobs to keep the application alive so that it doesn't go down every 5 minutes. The external cron job makes it stay alive for 2hours before the restart of apache. Not sure how to explain this better

 

My ghost URL https://www.5.5media.cf

Faster than any other cms I have ever used though it goes down every 2hours but it's OK with me since I am not paying for it.

[badrihippo]

Any idea how the Ghost distribution is packaged? I'm wondering if I can repeat the steps to package Ghost3 myself

 

Ghost is what I am using presently. I was able to get it setup and running with the help of @krydos, thanks to him. But you will still need external cron jobs to keep the application alive so that it doesn't go down every 5 minutes. The external cron job makes it stay alive for 2hours before the restart of apache. Not sure how to explain this better

My ghost URL https://www.5.5media.cf
Faster than any other cms I have ever used though it goes down every 2hours but it's OK with me since I am not paying for it.

Have you tried using an SSG to deploy your site? Like I'm doing with Gatsby here. That way you can use your Ghost only as the backend and have an always-available frontend to show users.

[Krydos]

To create the ghost package that is linked on the wiki I spun up a new VPS, installed ghost as their website instructs, made a few small changes that I don't really remember, maybe just a symlink, and then zipped the whole directory structure. To upgrade ghost to the new version using a new zip file like that I believe you would need to export all your data, install ghost again from scratch, and the import all your data.

[Seekier]

To upgrade ghost to the new version using a new zip file like that I believe you would need to export all your data, install ghost again from scratch, and the import all your data.

That means you'll have to upload all post images manually after importing your data

[Krydos]

If anyone is interested in upgrading, or installing the latest version of Ghost let me know and I can make a new package.

[Seekier]

If anyone is interested in upgrading, or installing the latest version of Ghost let me know and I can make a new package.

Thank you very much in advance for this. I am currently running on version 2.31.0, while the latest version is 3.13.3

 

I am 100% interested

[Krydos]

Alright, here you go https://krydos.heliohost.org/ghost/ghost_3.13.4.tar.gz I tested installing it on my Tommy account and everything seems to work. https://krydos.heliohost.org/ghost/

Edited April 3, 2021 by Krydos

[badrihippo]

Alright, here you go https://krydos.heliohost.org/ghost/ghost_3.13.4.tar.gz I tested installing it on my Tommy account and everything seems to work. https://krydos.heliohost.org/ghost/

 

Ooh, thanks a lot! I'm going to use this too, once I get the time to set it up :D

 

 

To upgrade ghost to the new version using a new zip file like that I believe you would need to export all your data, install ghost again from scratch, and the import all your data.

That means you'll have to upload all post images manually after importing your data

 

I haven't tested this yet, but I'm hoping to use the following method to upgrade:

• Install Ghost locally, with the same database parameters as the server-side one (this has been tested to work; I've set up a local Ghost installation to use the same Tommy database that my Heroku installation uses)
• Upgrade Ghost locally using the command-line process: this is also supposed to migrate the database so it works with the new version
• Install the new Ghost on the server and make it connect to the same database

This will avoid uploading/downloading all the post data; it's quite a bit in my case so Heroku was timing out my Ghost saying it's taking too long to respond. I guess step 4 would be to manually upload the images; in my case it's not necessary since I was using an "external" image server (basically Tommy, but through WebDAV). Edited April 3, 2021 by Krydos

[Seekier]

Thanks very much @krydos.

For my case I added all posts images manually after importing data contents by moving my old ghost/content/images folder into the new one Krydos provided and everything is back and working great with new features.

My only issue now is that ssl refused to validate after this upgrade, though I am patiently waiting to see if validation after 24hours.

Once again thank you very much Krydos

 

Modified:

Ssl certificate is now activated

Edited April 22, 2020 by Seekier