Self-hosting Part 2

I continued to move stuff today, but my ghost.org Blog was a real hassle. As I wrote yesterday, coolify includes a ghost Template for easy deployment, but that comes with a MySQL installation.

Since I’ve got almost all my databases on Hetzner directly (besides a few home automation ones that run on my NAS), I don’t need a separate MySQL installation. So I tried to create a custom Docker Compose setup, only declaring the ghost image and the needed variables. Well, that didn’t work, and I had to back away last night before completely wrecking my sleep schedule.

I tried again today, with a different method. Instead of crafting a Docker Compose file with one service entry, I switched to using only a simple Dockerfile. And voilà, it worked.

Next step, moving content. Luckily, ghost lets you export all your content to a simple JSON file. Well, all written content and settings, the few images I’ve uploaded in the past weren’t included. An email roundtrip with their support later, I now knew they had to export them for me, which they did right away. I already uploaded them again and can now say that https://blog.phaidenbauer.com/ is also running on my small €5 VPS.

Oh, and btw. I made an error yesterday on the cost of ghost.org. It’s actually $109, so about €100 to €105 yearly. Since everything looks fine, I cancelled the subscription today. With those €100 I can run the VPS for 20 months. We’ll see how the performance of that small machine will keep up and if I might need to upscale it. So far, it doesn’t look bad.

I also set up the Mailgun Integration on the “new” blog, so if you sign up there, you can get emails of my posts easily (if I decide to also send them via email).

There is quite a learning curve involved in hosting everything on my own again, but it’s quite refreshing to try out something new. I might tackle my carrd.co sites next, but the renewal for them is in December, so no hurry there.