Self-hosting Ghost in a Container

You probably want a new place to run your blog right now.

If you want to self-host Ghost with the convenience of a Docker container, you'll need somewhere to run that container. The Ghost(Pro) vs Self-hosting guide suggests that attempting to do this yourself will cost you $112 per month. This is demonstrably nonsense but to be fair to them, their $9 per month charge for hosting it all for you does get you quite a lot.

What do you actually need?

There is already a very good Ghost Docker Image available - it isn't maintained by Ghost themselves, but it is a Docker Official Image which is essentially the next best thing.

From my experience, you can run pretty comfortably with 512 MB Memory and minimal CPU - although the official Ghost self-hosting documentation recommends at least 1GB Memory.

You'll also need a MySQL 8 database and ideally a way to persist a volume of data between deployments.

What does that actually cost?

You can get a free managed MySQL service from Aiven with 1 CPU / 1 GB RAM / 5 GB storage, bringing the effective database cost to zero.

For running the Ghost container itself I looked at 5 different providers, with headline costs below:

*These prices exclude tax and are based on the absolute minimum compute resources necessary to run the Ghost Docker image, in the cheapest available region from each provider. They are heavily indicative only - see below for more details.

Hetzner

Of the options I looked at, Hetzner is the only one that doesn't support Docker out of the box. Instead you'll get a piece of a shared VPS on which you'll need to install and manage Docker yourself, as well as something like nginx or Traefik to route requests accordingly.

What you do get for $3.99 per month is a very decent CX22 server with 2 vCPU, 4 GB Memory, 40 GB storage and 20 TB bandwidth. This is enough headroom to run a containerised MySQL instance alongside your Ghost container - making use of a single docker compose file as illustrated in the Ghost Docker hub example - rather than using a service like Aiven.

Fly.io

Fly lets you run containers as first class citizens on their platform, so no need to manage Docker yourself. They used to have a free plan and then they just had paid plans and now they have a usage based model which does not include any free usage.

Their lowest tier doesn't offer quite enough RAM, but their second cheapest shared-cpu-1x option at $3.19 per month will get you the 512 MB you need plus 160 Gb bandwidth per month.

Fly don't include any storage with that, for which you'd need to pay $0.15 / GB per month and setup a separate volume - or see the Koyeb guide below for how you can make use of Cloudinary to get around this.

Koyeb

Similar to Fly, Koyeb lets you tell them what image you want to run and let them handle the rest. However, they are the only option here that will get you a production Ghost container running completely for free.

The Koyeb 'Free' instance type provides 0.1 vCPU, 512 MB, 2 GB storage and 100 GB bandwidth per month. You can link a Github repo containing your Dockerfile and manage your running service via their UI with deployments triggered on commit.

The Koyeb team themselves have written a thorough guide to Deploying a Ghost blog on Koyeb which as well as using Aiven as a cloud DB, makes clever use of Cloudinary to handle image uploads. This allows you to offload media storage from your Koyeb instance, keeping it happily within their free tier.

Koyeb seem pretty committed to keeping their free tier for the long-haul, which you can read about in Sustaining free compute in a hostile environment

AWS App Runner

You may want to go and get a white-board at this point.

App Runner lets you deploy and run containers within AWS, mostly without having to setup the usual network and application config they require. The lowest supported resource configuration that App Runner supports is 0.25 vCPU and 0.5 GB Memory - enough for us to run Ghost in a container.

You'll pay $0.007 per GB, per hour, for a provisioned container, and another $0.064 per vCPU, per hour, for an active container. As our chosen configuration uses a quarter of a vCPU per hour, and only half a GB Memory per hour, we need to workout the fractional cost of our resource units, and then estimate how much we think our container will be active.

Let's assume the container will be inactive for 8 hours a day, or 1/3 of the time:

(((0.007 / 2) * 24) + ((0.064 / 4) * 16)) * 30 = $10.20 per month.

You'll also need to store your Docker image in ECR, which does have a free tier for the first year, or permanently if your image is public.

Azure App Service

Replace the white-board with a crystal ball and a shrug emoji.

Azure App Service offers a similar PaaS-in-a-cloud-provider service to App Runner, with similarly opaque pricing. There is a Free tier that offer 1 GB Memory and 1 GB Storage, with a 'Shared Core' that offers 60 CPU minutes per day.

This is similar to App Runner in that Azure is only charging you when your container is actually doing something, but it's almost impossible to break down what this actually looks like in practice.

Assuming that isn't quite enough to run your Ghost instance comfortably, the lowest paid tier 'Basic Plan' offers 1 Core, 1.75 GB Memory and 10 GB of storage for $13.14 per month.

Conclusion

There is possibly a sweet spot for the size or type of workload where App Runner or App Service makes sense (assuming also you are already heavily invested in those ecosystems) - but this is not it.

If you have other containerised services you want to run, or you prefer VPS maintenance over spreading your Ghost setup across several cloud services, Hetzner might be a good choice.

If you want a container-based serverless option for reference, this blog is running completely for free on Koyeb and so far I think it's great.