Setting up a Ghost blog
Ghost is one of the cleanest publishing platforms going — fast, focused on writing, with built-in memberships and newsletters and none of the plugin sprawl that buries WordPress. If you are starting a blog on it, the first real decision is not a technical one but a hosting one: do you let Ghost run it for you, or run it yourself? This guide lays out both paths honestly, then covers the step most people skip — keeping your own copy of everything you write.
The one decision that shapes everything: Pro or self-hosted
Ghost is open-source software you can install on your own server, and the company behind it sells managed hosting called Ghost(Pro). Same software either way; the difference is who keeps the lights on.
Ghost(Pro) is the path of least resistance. You sign up, pick a plan, and you have a working blog in minutes with updates, backups, security, and email delivery all handled. Pricing starts at around $15 per month on the entry plan when billed annually, scaling up by how many members and how much email volume you need. You trade money for never thinking about servers. For most people who want to write rather than administer a machine, this is the right answer, and it is what Ghost themselves recommend.
Self-hosting means installing Ghost on a server you control — typically a small cloud VPS. The software is free; you pay for the box it runs on, which can be a few dollars a month, and you take on the upkeep: updates, backups, SSL, and configuring email sending. It is more work and more responsibility, but it is cheaper at scale and gives you full control. If that path appeals, there is a dedicated guide on self-hosting Ghost.
A reasonable rule of thumb: if your time is worth more than the hosting fee and you would rather not be a sysadmin, choose Ghost(Pro). If you enjoy running your own infrastructure or you are watching costs closely as you scale, self-host.
Getting the blog itself going
On Ghost(Pro), setup is a sign-up form: create your account, name your site, pick a theme, and start writing. You can point a custom domain at it from the dashboard. On a self-hosted install, you provision a server, install Ghost (the official CLI walks you through it), connect your domain, and configure an email provider for newsletters and transactional mail. Either way, once it is live you write in Ghost’s editor, manage tags and authors, and publish.
That part is well-trodden and Ghost’s own documentation covers it thoroughly. What its docs say less about is what happens to your writing afterward.
Then: keep your posts as files you own
Here is the thing worth setting up early, before your archive gets large. Inside Ghost, your posts live in a database behind a web editor — you cannot open them in another app, search them with your own tools, edit them in bulk, or hand them to an AI assistant. They are not files; they are rows. For a lot of the work that makes a blog better over time — fixing metadata across dozens of posts, refreshing old articles, keeping a real backup — that is a genuine limitation.
Specter closes it. It is a native macOS app that does two-way sync between your Ghost blog and a folder of plain markdown files: pull every post down to disk with its frontmatter preserved, edit it in any editor or with any AI tool, and push the changes back. The moment your blog is also a folder of files, every tool you own can reach it, you have a continuous backup of your whole archive, and you can do the bulk and AI edits the web editor cannot.
You do not need this on day one, but it is worth knowing it exists before you have three hundred posts trapped in an editor. When you are ready, connecting Specter and running your first sync takes a couple of minutes. Set the blog up the easy way, write in Ghost, and keep the source of truth as files on your own Mac.