When I ask people why they want a website, I hear these kinds of answers:

• I want more followers
• I want to show off my portfolio
• I want to show I am a professional
• Every company is doing it, so I need one as well
• I want to sell my product/services online
• I want to make more leads and sales
• Hell! I want to make money!

Of course money. But here, money is the result of what we do, not why we are doing it. It’s way too limiting.

I thought long and hard about this question and here is the best answer I could come up with.

I believe that everyone of us and all organizations really, are craving an impresario that represents us.

Let me repeat this. I believe the reason why we want a website is that we CRAAAA-VE an impresario that speaks in our name, an impresario that represents us.

Who doesn't want to have someone or an entity that will speak up and talk about:

• How great you are
• How cool you are
• How much you can be trusted
• How serious you are to have built this brand
• And hopefully on the other side of that coin, how human we are to not hide behind a logo

Who doesn't want that? It's every entrepreneur's dream if you ask me.

Actually, this is what we do at FirePress. It's our mission.

At FirePress, our mission is to empower freelancers and small organizations to build an outstanding mobile-first website.

Because we believe your website should speak up in your name, we consider our mission completed once your website has become your impresario.

I believe

I believe most of us are looking to put on our own touch, to make a little difference in how the world should be.

I believe we should plant our flag on the Web (and if you ask me... stop relying on only renting a flat on social networks). This flag does not represent a country, but instead, it tells a story about who we are, what we do and why we are doing it.

I believe that a brand is more than anything, a promise that we can execute with our offer.

I believe trust is one of the most important assets we can own and this trust can only be built by people who are playing for the long term, by people who are not looking for a shortcut.

I believe freelancers and small businesses don't wait to get picked, but instead they create their windows of opportunities.

I believe marketing wants to accomplish three things:

• Create awareness
• Build trust and
• Drive people to act

It's for you

I believe most people expect to have everything available on our phones. This belief is the main reason why I decided to build FirePress. It's for people like you:

• The freelancer
• The artist at heart
• The creator, the builders, the makers
• The woman who leads
• The man who takes charge

It's for the ones who believe in a cause greater than themselves. It's for the ones who can say, "Here, I made this, and if you like it, I can do this for you too."

Remember the impresario I just talked about? Well... Go for it and meet your impresario on this place you call your website. Let it speak up for you.

Oh... and one last thing. Can we find you and what you have to offer on this phone?

If the answer is not a big hell yes!! ... let me help you.

8 reasons to host your Ghost website on FirePress

From time to time, we can see a post[https://forum.ghost.org/t/managed-hosting-services-reviewed/18239] on theforums comparing the different hosting provider’s options. Since we launch backin May 2019[https://forum.ghost.org/t/host-your-ghost-website-on-firepress/7092…

FirePress TeamFirePress

Hear it

The text above is one of the first things I did when I decided to launch FirePress. I recorded it to make sure I'm staying focused on the mission.

Cheers!
Pascal Andy — Founder at FirePress 🔥📰

During our early adopter phase, we have special a special pricing model.

Plans pricing for each groups

Group #1
Our first 1 to 100 adopters will get 40% off the regular plan.

Group #2
The next 101 to 249 adopters will get 30% off the regular plan.

Group #3
The next 250 to 499 adopters will get 20% off the regular plan.

Group #4
The next 500 to 799 adopters will get 15% off the regular plan.

Group #5
The next 800 to 1000 adopters will get 10% off the regular plan.

Once Group #5 is over, we will officially close our Early adopter plan offer. At this point the standard price will apply.

To see the actual group, go back to pricing page.

Our update status page is where we monitor FirePress' site. Watch in real time status about our overall uptime, latest downtime (if any), general stats and more.

Real Time Status

In a case of an emergency where the FirePress's site is not accessible, we will share status on:

• Roadmap (Trello board)
• Twitter (@askpascalandy)

We track Incident History on this page.

02. Digital Ocean

Is where we manage our physical servers.

DigitalOcean Status

Welcome to DigitalOcean’s home for real-time and historical data on system performance.

03. Cloudflare

Is where our "internet proxy" happen. We do caching, CDN, DDOS and many security features with them.

Cloudflare Status

Welcome to Cloudflare’s home for real-time and historical data on system performance.

04. GitHub

Is where we manage code and CI.

GitHub Status

Welcome to GitHub’s home for real-time and historical data on system performance.

05. GitLab

Is where we host static content assets for clients with a custom homepage.

GitLab System Status

We continuously monitor gitlab.com and all its services. If there are any performance or service interruptions, an update will be posted here.

06. Docker Hub

Is where we host our Docker images.

Docker System Status

Our system status page is a real-time view of the performance and uptime of Docker products and services.

07. AWS

I where so many our vendors host their services. If they have an issue, we got an issue as well.

Next: our values

Table of contents

• What is Ghost?
• Is Ghost for me?
• Is Ghost responsive?
• How do you backup my data?
• What is the roadmap?
• How-to
• Contact

Some answers regarding play-with-ghost.com (PWG):

• What is play-with-ghost?
• Why did we create play-with-ghost?
• Why were my edits deleted on play-with-ghost?
• Which Ghost version is available on play-with-ghost?
• Is the Ghost Foundation is part of play-with-ghost?
• Who is behind play-with-ghost?

Search for posts and tutorials

What is Ghost?

Ghost is a web base solution that lets you create your website with a blog. It's an outstanding solution to use to publish and manage your content. You can see Ghost as a great alternative to CMS systems like WordPress, Medium, Drupal, Tumblr and other website builders.

It’s one of the most popular modern open source projects in the world. It's used in production by tens of thousands of companies and bloggers.

The project is mature, open-source and maintained by a dedicated team of 10 passionate people. More than 300 persons have contributed to the software at this point.

Is Ghost for me?

• It's for writers and bloggers.
• It's for non-technical peoples.
• It's for those are who looking for an alternative to Wordpress, Medium, Drupal and other CMS that have failed them.
• It's for people who are looking for a simple way to kick off their websites without messing with the design.
• It's for people who value owning their data and their brand.
• In the end, if you have something to share with the world (services, ideas, product), Ghost might be just the right fit for you.

Is Ghost responsive?

Absolutely! This is like asking if there are tomatoes in my ketchup. The website and admin area are both responsive.

If it's the first time you have logged into the Ghost dashboard, I would highly recommend for you to login via a desktop. It will give you a better sense of what it can do. Managing content takes space.

How do you backup my data?

• ✅ We maintain a minimum of three copies of your data at all times living on our server. This is called a hot backup.
• ✅ Every 4 hours, we copy your database, compress it, encrypted it and upload it to B2. This is also called an End-to-End encrypted cold backup. Every 24 hours, we do the same process with your pictures.
• ✅ Our cloud storage provided is Backblaze B2. They offer data durability at a rate of 99.999999999%. It means there’s a higher likelihood of an asteroid destroying earth within a million years than having our cloud provider lose a file.

What is the roadmap?

We share a public roadmap via this Trello board.

How-to

You can also easily search within our websites or find more information on our How-To section.

Contact

If our FAQ is missing something, feel free to contact us.

What is play-with-ghost?

play-with-ghost is a playground to help you learn about Ghost, by using and touching it. We believe Ghost is an outstanding CMS software to build websites and blogs.

What's remarkable here, is that you have the option to log into the admin panel by using provided dummy credentials. There are more than ten live demos to play with!

In short, you can try Ghost on the spot without having to sign-up!

AS A VISITOR, YOU SEE:

AS AN EDITOR, YOU SEE:

HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO:

• ✅ Create a page or a post as easily as sending an email
• ✅ Edit, remove posts & pages
• ✅ Create links inside and outside of your website
• ✅ Upload pictures
• ✅ Format your content in markdown
• ✅ Embed videos, forms, audio, etc
• ✅ Organize the navigation menu
• ✅ Import and export a backup
• ✅ Accept payments and embed an e-commerce store
• and more!

In short, as the editor, you are in control.

Why did we create PWG?

In plain English there are three main reasons.

1) To allow you to try Ghost without having to sign-up for anything. I believe you should not have to register to try the software and get all those spammy "hints" about the product. It's especially true when we have no idea if the application is good for your needs or not.

2) To allow you to see as a visitor, what a website made with Ghost looks like. The look of a website made in Ghost is driven by themes.

3) To allow you to put yourself in the shoes of an editor. To do so, you have access to a Ghost dashboard. This way you can realize how easy it is to publish and create your own website and blog with it.

User stories are defacto to way to right requirements for most software projects:

As a potential Ghost user
I want to see if Ghost could be
the solution for me so that I can publish
and communicate with my audience easily.

When I go on play-with-ghost
I expect to see many Ghost's themes to choose from.

I also want the option to edit websites
created with Ghost so that I can make a good decision
about whether Ghost is for me (or not).

Which Ghost version is available?

Thanks to the latest software best practices like running software in containers and CI/CD, we can deploy (and redeploy) Ghost often and quickly. We share a lot of our work on Github.

You can see the Ghost version here:

Why were my edits deleted?

On play-with-ghost the live demo sites are restored every 30 minutes. To understand what is going on under the hood, let me explain what the life cycle of a sandbox is.

1. Sandbox — A sandbox is an environment where a software lives for a limited period.
2. Restore — Live demo websites will reboot and reset themselves every 30 mins.
3. Error 404 — Chance are, nothing is broken. When the system restores the live demo, it takes about 30 seconds to reboot.
4. Stranger things — A live demo website is open to everyone. It means other people will do edits at the same time as you are. Don't be surprised if the content is changing and you didn't touch it.
5. Sandboxes are public — Please don't insert inappropriate content or do something stupid like deleting all the content. This place is like a park, and everyone wants to enjoy it.

30 minutes is not enough? — Simply active your trial here.

Is the Ghost Foundation related to this project?

No, it's an initiative made by me, Pascal Andy. I love Ghost and have used Ghost since version 0.4. I believe it's one of the greatest FOSS (Free and Open-source software) CMS ever!

You can learn about the Ghost foundation here.

Who is behind play-with-ghost?

The short version  is that play-with-ghost is a project built by Pascal Andy and it's sponsored by FirePress. Here is the long version.

If you are looking for our backlog, we share our FirePress Public Roadmap on this Trello board. It's a high-level perspective of what is going on at FirePress.

We believe by being transparent, it helps everyone to get on the same page.
Enjoy!

I'm Pascal Andy, the FirePress founder and my job is to care. Care about the way we communicate, care for our teams, care for our clients, and care for our products. In a nutshell, my job is to care for the things you care about.

To care as in the opposite of what I hate from some big corporation. You know — faceless — impersonal — careless — « we appreciate your call » kind of bull shit.

As I'm writing these words (May 2019), my job is to care for you, the early adopters. For you folks, thank you for being part of this journey. One day, my wish is that you will be so happy to use our products and services you will be raving about what we do here.

Only then, will I think about scaling the mission.

It started with one site

In October 2012 I decided to launch my first blog. I discovered that I loved to write and publish. At that time, my site was running on WordPress 3.xx.

While having fun blogging, I was in hell trying to optimize things and do software upgrades. Breaking the website was easy, I mean, for example, I had to re-install everything from scratch for having pressed the wrong button. Also, there were so many plugins to manage in order to have a decent website. Something was off.

In January 2014, I saw a great project on Kickstarter, it was Ghost. I followed the evolution of the project and very early on I decided to switch to Ghost (version 0.4). It was very early to blog on Ghost at this time. I loved how things were made and enjoyed the user experience so much more than on Wordpress.

Life was good. Then, a significant technology shift happened. It changed my geeky life.

In 2015, as I was reading TechCrunch, I saw a post regarding Docker. It explained this concept of deploying applications within containers and how powerful and cheap it was compared to run a VPS (virtual private server). I was hooked. Without knowing it, this was the kickoff I was waiting to kick off my next project: FirePress.

In 2016, I went all in about learning Linux stuff, operate servers at scale, DevOps practices and to understand this vast world of managing applications in containers. I mean actually doing it, not hiring other people to do it.

Today I'm proud to say that 100% of your websites are orchestrated and running in a container in Docker Swarm. You can learn about what's under the hood at FirePress and follow our evolution on our public roadmap.

2017 and 2018 were all about building the core of the platform — managing servers — deploying and updating the stack easily —  taking care of the backups, etc. Hardcore coding and putting in place good DevOps practices.

January 2019, as I'm writing these words, I'm working hard toward the mission and spending more time communicating our offer.

Early days

I love software. I have always been fascinated by the power hidden behind lines of codes. I love to connect the dots that seem disparate to unveils the "big picture." I like to ask myself and solve what is complex.

When I saw the movies the Matrix... that was it. Coding is cool, coding is the shit, coding is intense and with code, we can build amazing stuff.

In 1999, I decided to study coding in college. I learned how to program in C++, Visual Basic, Cobol, Assembler, how to do SQL queries and the like. Well, I'm the typical ENTP-A type of personality.

Wondering

There is one question I can't stop asking myself:

• How can we become the default one-stop-shop, where entrepreneurs start their Mobile-First websites and blogs?
• By the same token, how can I help the 2.5 billion new people who are arriving on the Internet for the first time?

While I'm still working to find the answer, you can check out why I decided to launch FirePress.

If this makes sense

If our mission resonates with you, I believe you should host your Ghost's website with us as I'm sure you will enjoy what we built here. We offer a 10-Day Free Trial for everyone who is looking to host their Ghost website.

Cheers!
Pascal Andy — Founder at FirePress 🔥📰

At FirePress, our ultimate goal is not to get bigger and bigger or grow at all costs. No. The goal is to make improvements to the status quo, to make things better and minimize the friction.

In our case, scale is leveraged on the fact that the technology costs are going down over time. On the other hand, the connections we make and our global knowledge is increasing.

Not only that, but we will put a second extra effort in for those who value what we value. We aim to make each connection a meaningful one. Because sustainability means you love what you got in the first place and you expect an even greater experience in the future.

It's an honor to share our journey with you and to be part of yours.

Next: Our mission