Why Use Ghost in a CoreOS Droplet?

Useful-Things.info is implemented as a Ghost engine on CoreOS in a Droplet hosted by digitalocean.com. This seems rather obtuse and complicated, in fact, it's just the opposite.

I've been using GoDaddy for hosting for a long time. They have a highly automated method to spin up a Wordpress site. The UX has improved dramatically over the years. However, you need to use their applications. Ghost isn't one of them. In technical parlance, the application is tightly coupled to the platform.

Digital Ocean has a Ghost container which is also coupled to the platform. But not as tightly. I'm not using it, I'm using CoreOS instead.

In CoreOS I just run a Docker command to start the Ghost container using a local directory as the persistent volume. I can make changes to the config.js file in the volume (mounted on /var/lib/ghost) and Ghost picks up the changes. If I want to create a new blog, I just point to another empty directory and I get a blank site, templates, database and all. I can even run two at the same time on the same IP address, just on a different port.

This site is on the cheapest plan, $5/month for 512MB RAM and 20GB of SSD. Which is about the same cost as GoDaddy, but much more flexible. Switching to a bigger plan is simple. Just stop the container, click on the new plan (say $10/month), start the container.