8 reasons to host your Ghost website on FirePress

FirePress Team -

From time to time, we see a post on the forums comparing the different hosting providers. Since we launched back in May 2019, I felt it was a good opportunity to share eight reasons you might consider our hosting solution.

I. Homepage

A big feature we offer over our competitors is the ability to host your custom homepage along with your Ghost site. This is NOT an 'enterprise' feature. Two examples:

A) Your domain structure could look like:

B) or if you prefer, you could set up your domain this way as well:

  • juliaburns.com/ (custom homepage)
  • blog.juliaburns.com/ (ghost)

You are responsible to design your homepage (HTML, CSS, JS). FirePress is not a website builder after all, it's a hosting service. In the future, we will offer templates that are easy to customize but we can't provide a timeline at the moment.

See all details regarding our homepage solution.

II. Pricing regarding the members

A) Staff user

  • Unlimited

B) Is there any limit of members/subscribers

  • Our plan includes the first 1 000 members for 190$ /year or 19$ /month.
  • For every additional 1 000 members, we charge 90$ /year or 9$ per month.
  • Per example: let's say for 10 500 members on an annual plan, we would charge: 67.50$ month ( which is the equivalent of  (190$ + (9 X 90$) = 810$ /year).

C) Are Mailgun emails included or do users have to pay extra?

  • Your plan includes sending transactional emails (newsletter to your members) for the first 1000 emails sent/month. If you need to send more emails, we will charge you 5$/month for every 2500 emails sent/month. source

D) Do you allow custom integrations?

  • Yes absolutely. You can generate your API keys from the Admin Panel.

III. Migration

You will be able to export/import your content from the 'labs' sections.

For the images, you will need to request an export from your existing hosting provider as you can't export them from the Admin Panel. It's something we do all the time. See all details regarding our migration process.

IV. Security

We manage the whole backend for you. Our servers run on Linux OS, highly available (HA) configurations, CDN, Docker that orchestrate services (containers), load balancer, CI/CD automation, zero-downtime deployments and other DevOps best-practices.

  • 🔐 Automatic SSL (HTTPS).
  • ⚔ DDoS attack mitigation.
  • 🔄 Automatic weekly updates.
  • 💾 Automatic daily backup. Backups are encrypted and transferred outside our servers cluster (cold storage). We back up your database every four hours and we back up your whole Ghost installation (pictures, themes, database) every 24 hours.
  • 🔥 Threat & uptime management with an SLA of 99.999%. This represents 26 sec per month or 5m15 per year of potential downtime. See our uptime status dashboard.

V. Try Ghost on the spot

play-with-ghost.com is a playground made by us to explore Ghost by using it and feeling it. What's remarkable here, is that you have the option to log in to the admin panel of our demo sites. In short, you can try Ghost on the spot without having to sign-up for a trial! Use these dummy credentials: relations@firepress.org | firepress1

VI. Forums

I'm very active on the Ghost forums. I like to help people that are within the Ghost ecosystem regardless they are clients are not. In other words, I am here for the long term.

VII. Transparent backlog

We share publicly what we are working on our public Trello board

VIII. Open-source

We contribute to the open-source space as well. Here are some git repositories we maintain:

You might be curious to know How do we update hundreds of Ghost's websites on Docker Swarm?

Conclusion

Finally, It's good to know we eat our own « Ghost food ». Our payment system is one built on a core Ghost functionality. In other words, we don't have a crazy fancy website that showcases things you can't do. At FirePress, what you see, is what you can do.

We can always sign-up for your free trial here. Let me know if you have other questions on Twitter or via our Contact page.

Pascal Andy — Founder
https://firepress.org

One last thing… be careful when someone states “no other competitor can do X”. It’s probably not true :-p