Self-Host Ghost Blog with a Custom Domain and Free SSL Using InfraPilot

Ghost vs Ghost Pro

Ghost is an open-source publishing platform that powers serious blogs and newsletters. Ghost Pro — their managed hosting — starts at $9/mo for minimal traffic. Self-hosting Ghost on a $6 VPS with InfraPilot costs less and gives you complete control over your content, subscribers, and data.

Prerequisites

• VPS with Docker installed, minimum 1 GB RAM recommended for Ghost
• Domain name with A record pointing at your server
• InfraPilot installed: curl -fsSL https://infrapilot.org/install.sh | bash

Step 1 — Create the Ghost Compose Stack

mkdir -p ~/apps/ghost && cd ~/apps/ghost

services:
  ghost:
    image: ghost:5-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      NODE_ENV: production
      url: https://${GHOST_DOMAIN}
      database__client: mysql
      database__connection__host: db
      database__connection__user: ghost
      database__connection__password: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      database__connection__database: ghost
      mail__transport: SMTP
      mail__options__host: ${SMTP_HOST}
      mail__options__port: 587
      mail__options__auth__user: ${SMTP_USER}
      mail__options__auth__pass: ${SMTP_PASS}
    volumes:
      - ghost_data:/var/lib/ghost/content
    ports:
      - "2368:2368"
    depends_on:
      - db

  db:
    image: mysql:8.0
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${DB_ROOT_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ghost
      MYSQL_USER: ghost
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql

volumes:
  ghost_data:
  db_data:

Create your .env:

GHOST_DOMAIN=blog.yourdomain.com
DB_ROOT_PASSWORD=strong-root-password
DB_PASSWORD=strong-ghost-password
SMTP_HOST=smtp.yourmailprovider.com
SMTP_USER=noreply@yourdomain.com
SMTP_PASS=your-smtp-password

docker compose up -d

Step 2 — Connect Your Domain in InfraPilot

1. Open InfraPilot dashboard → Traffic → Proxy Hosts → Add Proxy Host
2. Domain: your Ghost domain (e.g. blog.yourdomain.com)
3. Forward host: ghost, port: 2368
4. Enable Let's Encrypt SSL and tick Force SSL
5. Save — SSL is provisioned in under 30 seconds

Visit your domain and you'll see the Ghost setup screen. Create your admin account and start writing.

Step 3 — Configure Your Ghost URL

Ghost embeds the URL in email links, RSS feeds, and the admin panel. Make sure the url environment variable exactly matches your live domain including https://. If you need to change it later, update the env and restart: docker compose up -d.

Newsletters and Member Subscriptions

Ghost has built-in newsletter and paid membership support. To send newsletters, configure SMTP in the compose file. For paid memberships, connect Stripe under Ghost Admin → Settings → Memberships.

Monitoring Ghost with InfraPilot

Ghost is a Node.js application — watch for memory leaks in the InfraPilot metrics view. If the ghost container starts consuming more than 400 MB RAM, set an alert threshold. The unified log stream shows Ghost's startup logs, email delivery errors, and webhook failures all in one place.

To update Ghost, simply pull the new image and restart: docker compose pull && docker compose up -d. InfraPilot will reflect the new container version immediately.