If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that you can’t just FTP Ghost to a dinky shared host and expect it to run like your average PHP script. Ghost is a Node.js application, which works differently, and has yet to be adopted by services that generally cater to newbies. You’re going to need a VPS and command line access. I’m also going to assume a rudimentary knowledge of Linux commands. (You can pick up the basics pretty easily at linuxcommand.org if need be.)

This tutorial aims to walk you through the process of installing one ore more instances of Ghost behind the NGINX server. NGINX is a fast and lightweight web server that, when configured in this manner, acts as a proxy, forwarding requests to the correct Ghost blog.

DigitalOcean

I’m a big fan of DigitalOcean. I’ve been hosting my various web sites with them since this June, and their service has been of excellent quality. In addition to their rock-bottom price, their virtual machines have performed well and their staff has been competent and helpful. (You can find my review of DigitalOcean here.)

$5/month will get you a “Droplet” with 512MB of RAM, 20GB of storage on a solid state drive and plenty of data transfer. (It’s a soft cap with reasonable overages. You’re very, very unlikely to ever reach it, though. Unless you’re a popular podcaster or something, in which case you should be looking into a CDN…)

The figure that’s the most important is the RAM. Just like with the computer you’re using to read this, active applications reside in the system’s memory, and the amount they use varies depending on what the app is doing. Ghost, in my informal tests, doesn’t seem to be too memory-intense. So a 512MB Droplet could probably host a few Ghost blogs at once, depending on their popularity and how the system is configured.

There are plenty of options for a VPS, though. If you’re not too keen on DigitalOcean, Linode, Rackspace, Amazon EC2 and RamNode are popular. If you want to give DigitalOcean a try, you can sign up with the promo code DIVEIN5 to get a $5 credit. You can also pay by the hour if you just want to fire up a VM for a few hours to experiment before making a decision.

Initial Setup

Once you’ve got your VPS, it’s time to start setting things up. For simplicity, I will assume you are running Ubuntu 12.04. You can follow along with any Linux distribution on any hosting provider, but some commands may be a little different.

First, if you haven’t already, use SSH to log in to your VM as root, using the password your host gave you. Take this opportunity to change your password to something different, and reasonably strong, for security. Just run the passwd command and follow the on-screen instructions.

Now let the system update its package index by running the following command:

apt-get update

While you’re at it, install the unzip tool so you can unpack the Ghost archive later on.

apt-get install unzip

Installing Node.js

Now we need to install Node.js, the JavaScript platform that Ghost is built on. Ubuntu’s pre-made package probably isn’t new enough to run Ghost, so we’ll have to compile it ourselves.

First, install the Linux build tools through Ubuntu’s package manager. This will install the necessary compilers, as well as the make tool.

apt-get install build-essential

Now you need to change to your home folder, make a new directory to contain the source, and download Node.js.

cd
mkdir src
cd src
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.21/node-v0.10.21.tar.gz

If you run ls, you should see the archive in the src directory. If the file was successfully downloaded, you can unpack the archive and change to the resulting directory.

tar -zxvf node-v0.10.21.tar.gz
cd node-v0.10.21

Ready to compile? After you run the next two commands, be prepared to wait 5-10 minutes while the system works its magic and converts raw source code into an executable binary.

./configure
make

Once the messages stop scrolling by and the command prompt returns, you just need to run the installer.

make install

Congratulations, you’ve successfully compiled and installed a program from source! To verify that everything worked properly, run node -v. It should output the Node.js version, which in this case is v0.10.21. (Or a greater version if there is a newer one out by the time you read this.)

Ghost Installation

The next step is to install a copy of Ghost for each of your blogs. First, let’s make a place for them to reside in.

mkdir /var/ghost
cd /var/ghost

If you intend to use an FTP client to make it easier to upload themes or such, /var/ghost is the place where your blogs’ files will be found. So it’s a good path to remember. (On a related note, the SSH process also doubles as a secure FTP server. If your FTP client supports SFTP, you can connect to the domain/IP and log in with a valid username and password.)

To add a copy of Ghost, just follow these steps:

mkdir myghostblog
cd myghostblog
wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-0.3.3.zip
unzip ghost-0.3.3.zip
rm ghost-0.3.3.zip
npm install --production

What you’re doing is:

1. Creating a folder for the blog
2. Changing to that folder
3. Downloading Ghost
4. Unzipping Ghost
5. Removing the .zip file
6. Installing Ghost

Before we can actually start Ghost up, there is some essential configuration that needs to be adjusted.

Copy the example configuration file to a new config.js file with cp config.example.js config.js. Open the config.js file in the nano text editor with nano config.js. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to where the “production” environment starts in the config. It looks something like this:

production: {
    url: 'http://my-ghost-blog.com',
    mail: {},
    database: {
        client: 'sqlite3',
        connection: {
            filename: path.join(__dirname, '/content/data/ghost.db')
        },
        debug: false
    },
    server: {
        host: '127.0.0.1',
        port: '2368'
    }
},

There are three things you need to change:

1. The url field. Replace http://my-ghost-blog.com with http://whatever-your-domain-is.com.
2. The port field in the server block may need to be changed, depending on whether this is the first blog you’re setting up or not.

To save the file, press control+o and, then control+x to exit.

Web browsers, by default, connect to HTTP port 80 when requesting a web page. The way we’re setting this up, NGINX will listen on port 80, waiting for requests, and forward them to the ports your Ghost blogs are listening on. So Blog A can listen on port 2368 and Blog B can listen on port 2369. NGINX will listen on port 80, figure out which domain name belongs to which blog, and route the requests to the appropriate port.

Repeat the relevant steps in this section to set up additional blogs. You can wait until after you’ve finished setting up the first, if you want.

Upstart

We need to make it easy to start and stop the Ghost processes, and ensure that they come back online automatically if the server is restarted. On Ubuntu, it’s super simple with a system known as Upstart.

First, create a new Upstart configuration file called ghost.conf.

cd /etc/init
nano ghost.conf

Now fill it with the following Upstart script, replacing myghostblog with the directory you created for your blog:

start on startup

script
    cd /var/ghost/myghostblog
    npm start --production
end script

If you have multiple Ghost blogs set up, you would do something like this:

start on startup

script
    cd /var/ghost/myghostblog
    npm start --production
    cd /var/ghost/myotherghostblog
    npm start --production
end script

NGINX Installation

apt-get install nginx

That was easy, wasn’t it?

NGINX Configuration

NGINX keeps its site configuration files in two directories within /etc/nginx:

• sites-available — Each site gets its own configuration file in here
• sites-enabled — This directory contains symbolic links pointing to the files in sites-available.

Let’s create a new site configuration for myghostblog.

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
nano myghostblog

A simple configuration that does nothing but pass traffic addressed to my-awesome-ghost-blog.com to the Ghost blog listening on port 2368 looks like this:

server {
    server_name my-awesome-ghost-blog.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
    }
}

Of course, NGINX is a powerful and flexible piece of software that is capable of a lot more. This is just one of many things you can use it for.

As before, save the file by pressing control+o and quit nano with control+x. Next, move back up one directory level to /etc/nginx and create a symbolic link in sites-enabled, pointing to the file in sites-available.

cd ../
ln -s sites-available/myghostblog sites-enabled/myghostblog

Fire it Up

Now that you have everything configured, you can start (or stop) the processes with the service command.

service ghost start
service nginx start

You can replace start with stop to exit ghost or nginx if you have reason to do so, or restart if you need to reload one after making some sort of change. (e.g. editing Ghost’s config.js file requires that Ghost be restarted.) NGINX can reload its config files without doing a full restart of the process with service nginx reload, which takes less time and is useful when making edits.

If all went well, you should be able to open your Ghost blog in a browser.

Managing Memory

How much memory is Ghost using, you may wonder. And if you aren’t, you probably should. The enemy of performance on web servers is swapping, which is where the system runs out of available RAM and starts copying things back and forth to the hard disk, causing major slowdowns. This is frequently referred to as “thrashing.” Even a fast solid state drive is orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

There are some useful tools for monitoring available RAM and inspecting active processes. The most commonly used ones are free, top, and ps.

The free command shows the system’s memory totals. If you run it with the m flag (free -m) to show the values in human-readable megabytes instead of plain bytes, you should see something like this:

root@DeepSpaceNine:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           369        129        239          0         11         51
-/+ buffers/cache:         67        302
Swap:          767          0        767

The most important line is the one labeled -/+ buffers/cache. Modern operating systems don’t waste memory. If nothing else is making use of it, the OS will make use of it until the space is needed. The -/+ line shows the usage sans caches. In this example, there are 302MB of free memory with only 67 being in use. There is also nothing in swap, which is exactly what you want to see.

The top command shows a live-updated table of currently running processes, and statistics for them. By default, it’s sorted by CPU activity, but you can sort by memory usage by pressing shift+M.

Pressing control+C exits top.

Need to see a list of all running processes? Run ps aux. Be prepared for a huge list, as it will be full of system processes.

Conclusion

I hope this guide helps you get started with Ghost. I realize it is a bit technical, something the upcoming hosted service and DigitalOcean’s one-click Ghost image should help obviate, but hey, it’s new. It was harder to get up an running with WordPress back in 2003, too.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Oct. 15, 2013) — GoDaddy, the Web’s largest platform for small businesses, has acquired (mt) Media Temple, a Los Angeles-based Web hosting and cloud services company focused on the creative class of digital designers, developers, entrepreneurs and innovators.

The two companies will continue to operate independently. The strategic acquisition provides GoDaddy with direct access to Media Temple’s hosting gurus, who will share knowledge and insight on how GoDaddy can better serve Web professionals and developers. GoDaddy provides scale and investment for (mt) to accelerate its growth and further expand internationally.

Media Temple is a popular option for Linux-challenged web designers seeking managed hosting with a friendly control panel, though they pay significantly more for the convenience. Though that may change as GoDaddy’s influence permeates their acquisition.

History lesson aside, here’s what DigitalOcean has to offer: affordable VPS hosting with plenty of memory and fast solid-state drives. Their offerings are comparable to those of the venerable Linode, though cheaper. (The difference comes down to which is more important to you: CPU or price.)

Their cheapest plan gets you a VM with 512MB of RAM and 20GB of space for a mere five dollars per month (or $0.007/hour). That’s cheaper than a lot of shared hosting plans, for a speedy box with full root access. The plan I’m using is their $10/month option, which comes with one gigabyte of memory.

Backups and snapshots of VMs are priced reasonably, with backups costing 20% of the server’s price (e.g. $1 per month for a $5 per month server) and snapshots being $0.02 per gigabyte stored.

The service has been stable so far, and the one support ticket I opened was resolved in a timely manner. Performance-wise, there has been a definite improvement over my previous host. (It’s also nice having the server be in New York, which results in a much more favorable network latency from where I live.)

DigitalOcean has a freshly redesigned control panel, from which you can manage your servers, DNS, billing and other settings. It’s also the place where you can set up your API access if you want to manage things from a mobile app, command line utility, or even use a Vagrant provider.

I’ve been very happy with DigitalOcean since my big switch, and definitely recommend them if you’re in the market for a decent VPS provider. If you want to give them a try, here’s my affiliate link. If you enter the promo code SSDPOWER on the billing settings page, you’ll get $10 worth of free credit. You can spin up a VM, play around with it, and delete it when you’re done.

Given the very low price and the long retrieval delays, it is a logical assumption that Amazon is using magnetic tapes for the storage.

Amazon suggests that the service would be used for archiving and preserving records, media, scientific data, or anything that requires long-term storage. It would work well for off-site backups in general, even for your personal computer, since storage is absurdly cheap and you don’t need to retrieve backups too often.

There are countless alternatives for the services GoDaddy offers, but many newbies are not too aware of them. After all, they don’t pour money into TV ads during the Superbowl.

Since I’m frequently asked for suggestions, I figured it would make for a good post.

Domains

It is usually prudent to register domain names with a separate company from the one that actually hosts your web site. That way, if you have cause to switch for one reason or other, you can simply edit the DNS to point it to your new host, and you don’t have to worry about transferring the name from one service to another.

There are many domain registrars, but a few that are frequently recommended are:

• Name.com — Name.com recently went above and beyond to help recover a domain that was hijacked from a web development blog. Even though the thief had transferred it away from GoDaddy and only moved it to Name.com temporarily before being shuffled over to 1and1, Name.com was the only company involved to step up and coordinate the recovery of the stolen name.
• Hover — Hover charges a premium, but their goal is simplicity and no BS. They won’t push extra services on you when you buy a domain or clutter your admin panel up with ads.
• Namecheap — A popular option, though I know less about them. A lot of the people moving away from GoDaddy during the SOPA boycotts went with Namecheap.
• 1and1 — I’ve been using 1and1 for my many domains for several years. (Since 2005 or so, maybe.) I haven’t had an issue with them so far, though some people have reported issues with their customer service department. They get a bit of flak, whether it’s warranted or not, but I have been happy with their service for about seven years.
• Gandi — Gandi’s motto is “no bullshit™.” They handle a large selection of TLDs, so they’re a good bet if you’re looking for something exotic, like a .it, .io, .ly, .me, or .fm domain. Their prices do vary depending on the extension, though, since country-level domains vary depending on their home nation’s policies.
• Moniker — I currently have one domain registered with Moniker, as I had acquired it after the previous owner allowed it to expire, and I never moved it away from Moniker. I haven’t had issue with them so far, and they’re an established name in the industry.

Shared Hosting

There are three major types of web hosting services: shared, VPS and dedicated. Shared hosting is the cheapest option, and is the easiest for beginners to get started with. Basically, you share a server with many other users. Its resources are allocated equally, and everything usually works fine so long as none of the website get too much traffic. Things get a little more complicated then, and the host may suspend the offending web site and ask them to upgrade to a pricier service.

Some hosts advertise “unlimited” bandwidth, but you shouldn’t take that claim too seriously. While they may not meter your bandwidth, they will still cut you off if serving your site takes up too much CPU time. (More traffic means more requests served simultaneously, which means greater processor usage. Obviously they don’t want to impact the other sites on the server, so they suspend the site.)

• A Small Orange — ASO aims to provide affordable and fair web hosting without overselling, a tactic that some hosts use to maximize profits, selling more accounts on a server than the hardware can handle, under the assumption that the majority of users won’t be fully utilizing what they pay for. A Small Orange is upfront about the limitations of each plan they offer. You can get a shared hosting account starting at $35/year ($2.91/month) and move up to higher plans as needed. Their $10/month plan with 5 gigabytes of storage space and 100GB of transfer is a pretty good deal, and more than enough for even a moderately popular blog. They also offer reseller, VPS and dedicated plans if you outgrow shared hosting. [Affiliate Link]
• Nearly Free Speech — What if you didn’t pay a flat monthly fee for basic web hosting? What if you only paid for what you used, and not a penny more? That’s how Nearly Free Speech works. Pricing can get a little complicated, but it can be very cheap as a result. You make a deposit, as little as $0.25, and pay as you go. Serving up static HTML isn’t going to cost much, depending entirely on how popular your site is and how much you’re storing on their servers. Dynamic sites, like WordPress blogs, start with that same baseline, but there is and additional $0.01/day dynamic site fee, and additional usage fees for your MySQL database.
• WP Web Host — This one is well-known in the WordPress community. They specialize in hosting services for WordPress. They’re up front about their policies on the maximum system resources that you can consume under a shared plan, as well. (15% CPU, 512MB of RAM)
• Media Temple — Media Temple’s “Grid Service” offering, though pricier than most shared hosting services, is known for being more reliable. They use redundant server clusters that can “burst” extra resources to handle spikes in traffic. You get a 100GB storage pool and up to one terabyte of monthly network transfer. Media Temple offers a custom control panel, and one-click installs of popular software packages, such as WordPress.

Virtual Private Servers

While a shared host puts many users’ sites in the same server environment, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is more like having a dedicated server, though it is significantly cheaper. Using a technology known as virtualization, a server is partitioned into several virtual servers. Far less customers are put on one machine, so you have a much greater share of the hardware’s resources, and you also have full control over the server environment. In most cases you’re given remote access to the command line, and you can install your choice of operating system (Linux or Unix distributions, in most cases) and configure things however you want.

There are two varieties of service you’ll find when you purchase a VPS: managed and unmanaged. With a managed server, you give up some control in order to have the provider take care of the technical details for you, and maybe offer a friendly control panel like cPanel. With an unmanaged server, you’re given free reign over your virtual machine and little support (unless you pay extra to be rescued). If you’re familiar with Linux and don’t mind getting your hands dirty in order to retool things for your needs, an unmanaged VPS is awesome.

• A Small Orange — (See the above entry under Shared Hosting.) A Small Orange also offers VPS plans, as well as dedicated servers. Their servers are fully managed, and include a cPanel license. So they’re a good bet if you don’t want to make the leap to managing a server and editing configuration files from the command line.
• VPS.net — My hosting provider of choice. They offer a few different services, their “cloud servers” offering being what I use. You get a scalable VPS (you can add or subtract “nodes” of resources and deploy them with a quick reboot) and unfettered access over SSH. It’s unmanaged unless you purchase optional “managed services” or one-time “do it for me” support tickets. It’s very reliable, and there are datacenters across several continents. A single-node VPS with 376MB of RAM, 10GB of disk space and 1TB of network transfer will run you $20/month. [Affiliate Link]
• Linode — Linode is a well-liked option along similar lines to VPS.net. Their offerings provide good bang for the buck (a 512MB system with 20GB of storage and 200GB of transfer will cost you $19.95/month) and they’re known for their support. They also have a nice collection of tutorials, which I have referred to in the past, even though I’m not a customer.
• Media Temple — MT also offers virtual servers, several variations of that theme in fact. They have their VE, GS and Nitro plans, which all have their different pluses and minuses. I don’t have any personal experience with Media Temple, though they have a good reputation and I had considered them at one point.
• Rackspace — Rackspace is a big player in the cloud server arena. They provide numerous services for varying needs. They host many web apps, like Amazon.
• Amazon Web Services — Few names are more well known in cloud services than Amazon. Their EC2 service powers a lot of big-name web apps and social networking sites, though it is just as viable for smaller sites. They also have S3, which is good for storing and serving static files, CloudFront, their CDN, and others.

Those are just a few suggestions. Whatever your needs are, there are many options out there. Be sure to shop around and look for reviews before comitting to a service.

A good resource for asking for advice is the Web Hosting Talk forum.

Blitz is a configurable service that will pound your site with page requests, allowing you to specify the concurrency, timeout, and duration of the onslaught. As it goes about this, it builds statistics and plots them along timelines. You can watch response times, errors and timeouts as it slowly ramps up the number of concurrent users until it reaches the maximum. At the end, it even projects how many hits per day your setup can handle at that rate.

The service has a generous free tier, though they offer paid upgrades for higher concurrency and duration. The free tier offers 250 concurrent users over a one minute rush. (Though if you sign up with this invite link, they will add additional concurrencies to your account.)

I found Blitz very useful when I was trying to squeeze faster response times out of my WordPress setup, tweaking my caching system options and adjusting Nginx and PHP configurations. Since they use the connections at their datacenter, you get more real-world results than if you simply ran Apache Bench locally on the server, or from your residential internet connection. Both tools have their uses, of course, and Blitz is a good one to have in your arsenal.

Fortunately, the solution is simple.

You just need to run sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup and follow the on-screen prompts. You would usually use the arrow keys to traverse the menus, but that isn’t exactly possible, is it? Pressing the first letter of the option you’re looking for until it cycles up and is selected works fine, though. (Apple Laptop, USA-style layout, etc.) The full instructions on what you should pick for MacBooks are available here.

Now, moving in and out of the VM window is a little bit annoying, so I installed an SSH server.

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Easy enough. Now you can SSH into the server from a native Terminal session, which is easier to Command+Tab in and out of, and you can make use of the clipboard. Not being able to copy and paste sure is limiting.

Now you only have one final obstacle standing between you and easily connecting to the server. Whether you’re using SSH or accessing a web page being served by the VM, you need to figure out the local IP address of the VM on the network and input that. Or you can set up ZeroConf, which lets other machines on the network automagically find the VM when you call it by name. Instead of addressing it as 192.168.0.255, you could use Ubuntu.local. (Very handy when you’re running game servers on your LAN.)

The following command will install the required packages to enable ZeroConf on the VM.

sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon avahi-discover avahi-utils libnss-mdns service-discovery-applet mdns-scan

Now you can reach the VM at thehostname.local, which is considerably easier than figuring out what IP your router has assigned it and pasting it in whenever you need it.

Amazon CloudFront is one of the cheaper CDNs, but many people worry about it’s seemingly complicated pricing scheme. Since you pay for what you use, your monthly bill is calculated based on how many gigabytes of data you transfer and how many HTTP requests are made.

You pay $0.0075 for every 10,000 HTTP requests, and $0.12 per gigabyte for North American and European visitors. The cost-per gigabyte is slightly higher for other regions, but it doesn’t go over $0.25/GB.

So how much do you end up paying for a blog with around 40,000 page views per month? $0.64.

I’ve been running CloudFront for a little while now, and I ended up paying about sixty-four cents from the 3.004GB of transfer incurred over the month of January. It’s definitely affordable, and should help take some load off your server, besides decreasing load times.

While it does make sense to pay for a tool if you use it extensively for commercial purposes, you may not be ready to if you’re an indie developer just beginning a project that won’t hit the shelves for awhile. Also, if you’re using it for versioning and deploying websites, you may not want to have all of your source be public.

GitHub’s business model is primarily the sale of premium accounts with varying numbers of allowed private repositories, starting at $7/month for five private repositories and up to one collaborator. It’s not a bad deal at all, as GitHub is by and large open source projects, but you may still want to find a better offer. Fortunately, there are a couple of solid competitors.

BitBucket

BitBucket is very much like GitHub, functionally. It has the same sort of social collaboration tools, and most of the same features. But that’s where the differences end. Their pricing scheme is to give you all of the repositories you could possibly want, both public and private, while charging to add extra collaborators to your private repositories. You get five for free, and can upgrade to ten for $10/month, twenty-five for $20/month, etc.. Oh, and they support both Git and Mercurial.

I’ve been using BitBucket lately for some of my projects, and it’s been great so far.

Beanstalk

Beanstalk only does private repositories, offering plans limited by disk space and the number of repositories, as well as the number of authorized users. Aside from their 100MB single-repository trial plan, their offerings start at $15/month for 3GB of space, 10 repositories and 5 users. One of their unique selling points is their integration with tools like Basecamp and Lighthouse. They also have quite a few corporate customers.

Their cloud system has been solid, with the only unscheduled downtime (that wasn’t my fault!) being a brutal Denial of Service attack that occurred a couple months after I signed up. I love the scaling features and flexibility they offer, and their support has been excellent so far. Tickets are answered quickly, their on-demand “here’s some money, please fix this for me” service is a lifesaver, and they constantly monitor their Twitter account and forum.

Two years later, I finally finished ironing the kinks out of my setup. I’m running the tiny and lightning-fast NGINX server, which servers PHP scripts through php-fpm. It uses very little RAM compared to the usual Apache setup that is the de facto standard. There’s still room for further optimization, but I’m very pleased with what I have so far.

I have to wonder: why do so many people have an issue with them? They’ve provided nothing but stellar service to me, and other bloggers who have voiced their happiness with VPS.net. I’ve noticed a recurring theme among complainers being that cPanel isn’t installed by default, so I have to wonder: are most of the dissatisfied customers people coming from shared hosting, lacking Linux skills, and not wanting to learn how to set up and administer a server?

I really wonder if they’re having a fundamental misunderstanding of the product, and they’re thinking they’re buying a managed VPS at the cheaper price of an unmanaged one. They do offer a managed service, which I have seen people write about, saying they were “shocked” that they would demand money to “set up their website.” I guess that’s why the have their new idiot-proof Cloud Hosting option now.