Moving to Digital Press
I started incurring a lot of costs on AWS (t2.micro + EBS storage + elastic IP), so decided to move this blog to Digital Press which is free.
Other options, I considered were:
- Managed Ghost on ghost.org: $9/mon.
- Ghost on Digital Ocean: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/ghost (would have to pay for the droplet)
- hashnode: Not a ghost blog, but pretty good feature-wise and free.
On the Digital Press end, I first created a blog site with their default domain (digitalpress.blog). To edit it, add /ghost to the domain. You can remove the default posts and pages by removing the profile for user "ghost".
More details on the steps involved are listed below (Ref: https://ghost.org/help/the-importer/)
- From the original blog (hoopedondata.com), go to https://www.hoopedondata.com/ghost/#/settings/labs
- Export your content packs everything into a single json file and downloads it to your local storage.
- From the settings in your new location (e.g. https://hoopedondata.digitalpress.blog/ghost/#/settings/labs): Import Content -> Choose File.
- This imports all posts (published and drafts).
To point the blog to a custom domain, I ended up choosing CloudFlare as a free DNS provider. I opted out of GoDaddy's DNS management. The Cloudflare settings are shown below:
Note also that SSL/TLS encryption mode should be set to Full.