A short guide to running Ghost in a production environment and setting it up to serve traffic at scale.

Ghost(Pro)

The most efficient way to deploy a production-ready instance of Ghost is on our official fully-managed PaaS. Ghost(Pro) runs the exact same open source codebase and has no limitations compared to self hosting. It's the easiest way to save a lot of time installing and managing your environment.

Ghost(Pro) Self-Hosting
🎛 Product features Identical Identical
🖥 Managed install & setup ✅ ❌
🔄 Automatic weekly updates ✅ ❌
🚧 Server maintenance & backups ✅ ❌
⚠️ Threat & uptime management ✅ ❌
🔒 SSL Certificate Automatic Manual
🌍 Worldwide CDN included ✅ ❌
🥊 Enterprise-grade security ✅ ❌
🚑 Customer Support Priority Email Support Community Support
❤️ Helps to fund all future
development of Ghost software		 ✅ ❌

Self-hosting

For self-hosting Ghost in production our officially recommended stack is:

  • Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04
  • MySQL 5.5, 5.6, or 5.7 (not >= 8.0)
  • NGINX
  • Systemd
  • Recommended Node version installed via NodeSource
  • A server with at least 1GB memory
  • A non-root user for running ghost commands

Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 are the only officially supported operating systems. Our Ubuntu install guide walks you through how to get a server setup this way.

Other operating systems may work fine and you're welcome to use them, but we are unable to assist with debugging or optimising for them at present - so you're on your own there. Our recommendation: Use Ubuntu, because that's where you'll have the fewest headaches.

Selecting a webhost

You can use just about any hosting provider which provides a reasonable VPS to work with. Ghost officially partners with Digital Ocean, who also offer a pre-made Ghost image. We recommend them very highly.