If you are already on Flex plan, like we are, you get to keep it at least for now. Mailgun may change their mind about that and "sunset" that plan in the future. So what are the new plans that they're making available and are they any good?

Two new plans

The Foundation plan discussed in our previous post remains largely unchanged, but the Flex Plan has been replaced with two new plans: Free and Basic.

Free

The Free plan comes with a sending limit of 100 emails per day. Technically this would allow you to send anywhere between 2800 and 3100 emails a month if you limit yourself to batches of 100 emails, but this is not really how email newsletters work. In practice this is a suitable plan only if you still have under 100 subscribers.

The limit is also firm - you can't simply pay for more emails (aka overages). To be able to send unlimited emails you must have a monthly plan.

More details about the free plan can be found here.

Basic

The Basic plan is now the cheapest unlimited option, but it starts at €15 a month.

It comes with 10,000 emails a month included in the price and has no daily sending limit. If you're sending more than that you can either pay for the extra emails, or upgrade to the Foundation plan which remains largely unchanged.

Overages

Hidden in the new price structure is also a change to how much overages cost, ie. how much Mailgun will charge you for additional 1,000 emails.

In the now deprecated Flex Plan and previous pricing for Foundation plan a 1,000 emails extra in a month would have cost you $1.

Under the new pricing you can get a 1,000 emails for $1.80 under Basic, $1.30 under Foundation, and $1.10 under Scale. Fundamentally the more expensive your monthly plan, the cheaper the overages; the more you send the less you pay per email.

You should compare the plans they offer on their website in more detail.

Conclusion

The two new plans don't come near the advantages you would have gotten with the Flex plan. If you have more than 100 subscribers and are sending fewer than 10,000 emails a month the options that are available are now less than desirable. They are more expensive and well, less flexible!

If you are already on Flex plan and have already close to sending 10,000 emails a day you now have an option to switch to the Basic monthly plan a little earlier. This will make the billing more predictable until you hit the 10k mark, but note I don't recommend doing so; the cost per email, overages included, is still lower on Flex plan than it is on Basic.

I'm happy to report that the point at which you should switch from a Flex to a Foundation plan remains the same; it's after you start to routinely send more than 35k of emails a month. Foundation remains priced at $35 for 50k emails, which is the best price for people who send between 35k and 50k emails a month.

If you start on Basic plan and you're considering switching to Foundation you should do this just after you reach 21k emails a month. With the price of overages being $1.8 per 1k of emails on Basic Plan, 21k emails will come to about $34.8. You will have to pay $36.6 for 22k emails, which is more expensive than the Foundation plan's base cost offering 50k.

I have shopped around and have not found another reputable email delivery company that has a better starting plan. I note however with suspicion that Mailgun's new Basic plan mimics the base cost, quantity of email, and overage pricing of a pre-existing Postmark's Basic plan exactly.

Ghost Pro Starter plan is $9 per month, billed annually, or $11 per month billed monthly, but to get the same functionality - custom themes, custom integrations, and 2 staff users - we would have had to choose their Creator plan... which is $25/mo if billed annually and $31/mo when billed monthly. This seemed too much for what is right now a small site with limited number of members and infrequently published newsletter. You may have found yourself in the same situation and looking for a less costly solution.

Digital Ocean

Our hosting platform of choice is Digital Ocean because of their very predictable pricing, ease of use, and fantastic documentation. Digital Ocean offers Ghost CMS as a one-click app which streamlines the setup of Ghost installations. Even if you're not familiar with managing Linux servers it's very approachable.

Ghost | DigitalOcean Marketplace 1-Click App

Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication. It powers blogs, magazines and journalists from Zappos to Sky News.

DigitalOcean

Using the one-click app will create a Digital Ocean droplet (which is their nomenclature for a virtual private server, or VPS), deploy Ghost, and help you set it up once it's ready and your DNS records are enabled. You will have a choice of various Droplet configurations to choose from, but the cheapest one you will be able to select is the $12 Basic droplet with, which comes with a 50GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM and 1 Intel vCPU.

This will work great for most people but this is not the cheapest droplet available on Digital Ocean overall. We have found that very small blogs and newsletters like ours don't need that much memory or disk space and you could save more money by choosing $6 Basic droplet. Unfortunately because the droplet disks can only be sized up - and can't be reduced in size after the droplet is deployed - if you start with the $12 droplet there's no going back.

Where the one-click-app saves you a lot of time and hassle, it locks you into using $12 droplet - or larger - for the foreseeable future.

Pinching Pennies

As with many things in the technology space you can spend your time instead of money when starting out. By choosing the slightly harder path and installing Ghost on a Digital Ocean droplet manually rather than via one-click-app you can save yourself $6 a month, or $72 per annum.

This may seem intimidating if you're not familiar with the Linux command line, but every step of the way is thoroughly documented both by Digital Ocean and by Ghost. Below I offer some tips on how to get there.

Create a $6 Digital Ocean Droplet

Follow the Digital Ocean documentation to set up your droplet:

Set up a Production-Ready Droplet | DigitalOcean Documentation

Create a new Droplet with our recommended configuration for improved security, reliability, and monitoring.

DigitalOcean Documentation

More straight-forward instructions are available but we recommend you use the this guide as it includes basic instructions on pre-configuring and securing your droplet as well.

Pay attention to the options that are available to you when creating the droplet. While some of these options can be changed after the droplet is created, most are immutable.

• select a region that is closest to you, or to your readers. The further away geographically it is, the slower the site will load
• select an image that is supported by Ghost installation - these currently are Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - while newer versions of Ubuntu are available, they are not fully tested and instructions may not work for you
• in size section select a Basic droplet type, then Regular CPU with SSD disk type, then finally select $6/mo droplet
• name your droplet the same as your domain name for easier identification
• tag your droplet to ensure you can apply firewall protection to it

Set up your DNS

Same as if you were using a one-click-app for Ghost you now need to set up your Domain Name Service (DNS) record. Domain name registrars usually provide a way for you to manage your DNS records that vary wildly, so you will need to consult their documentation for this.

You need to create a new A record and point it to the IP address of the droplet you have just created. The droplet IP address will be visible in your Digital Ocean control panel.

We use Digital Ocean for managing our DNS though and recommend it as well. You can learn more about that in their documentation.

DNS How-Tos | DigitalOcean Documentation

How to accomplish specific tasks in detail, like creation/deletion, configuration, and management.

DigitalOcean Documentation

Resize your droplet

While running the Ghost installation on a $6 droplet is perfectly fine, Node.js which Ghost is written with requires increased memory for the installation and update process. For this we recommend to temporarily resize your droplet to the $12 one, making sure that the disk size remains the same. This will allow you to resize the droplet back down to the smaller $6 size when the installation is completed.

Follow these instructions to resize the droplet, and ensure you select the "CPU and RAM only" option.

How to Resize Droplets | DigitalOcean Documentation

Resize a Droplet to change the amount of CPU and RAM a Droplet has, optionally add additional disk space, or change to a different type of Droplet plan or CPU.

DigitalOcean Documentation

Install Ghost

Use SSH to access your droplet and install ghost following these instructions. I recommend you read through the entire instructions first before you get started.

How to install & setup Ghost on Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04

A full production install guide for how to install the Ghost professional publishing platform on a production server running Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04.

Ghost - The Professional Publishing Platform

If you have used the Advanced Options Initialization Script when setting up your droplet you can skip the "Create a new user" section. Instead when logging into your server log in as the same user you added in the script:

# Login via SSH
ssh notghost@droplet_ip

Follow with all the steps as in the instructions, replacing "user" in the scripts with the actual username you have selected.

Once you run the installation process, it will ask you some questions. I recommend you let Ghost set things up for you automatically by choosing the default options, but ensure that blog URL is the same domain name as the record you have set up in the DNS step before.

Now it's time for a cup of tea or coffee! The installation process can take a while.

Once the installation is completed navigate to your Ghost site and create your owner account by appending your domain name with /ghost

Resize your droplet again

You may get excited at this point and want to go straight to configuring and building your Ghost publication... but wait!

Your droplet is still at $12/mo following the installation.

Navigate back to Digital Ocean control panel and shrink the droplet back to $6/mo size.

How to Resize Droplets | DigitalOcean Documentation

Resize a Droplet to change the amount of CPU and RAM a Droplet has, optionally add additional disk space, or change to a different type of Droplet plan or CPU.

DigitalOcean Documentation

Now your Ghost installation is ready for you to get started. You can customise it further by going through the documentation below:

Ghost Resources — Stories & Ideas About Indie Publishing

A library of resources to help you share content, grow your audience, and build an independent subscription business in the creator economy!

Ghost Resources

Monitoring

Running Ghost on the smallest possible droplet will mean your memory utilisation will be upwards from 80% of the 1GB allocated, even when it's idle or not particularly busy. This means your site will be at more risk of running out of memory and either becoming too slow to respond to requests, or unavailable entirely.

To mitigate that risk we do recommend to use a monitoring service that will periodically automatically check if the site is up and responding, and let you know if it's not. We like Uptime Robot which is free for basic functionality.

UptimeRobot: Free Website Monitoring Service

Start monitoring in 30 seconds. Use advanced SSL, keyword and cron monitoring. Get notified by email, SMS, Slack and more. Get 50 monitors for FREE!

GoDaddy logo

Should your website become too popular for the $6 droplet you can always scale up!

How does it stack up?

This minimal setup is very plainly cheaper than what you would have to pay for Ghost Pro and it will work well for small sites.

Monthly Billing

Annual Billing

Other Considerations

A more detailed breakdown of costs, features, and bundled options on self-hosted vs Ghost Pro can be found below:

Hosting a Ghost publication - Fully-managed PaaS & self-hosted

The most efficient way to deploy an instance of Ghost is on our official fully-managed PaaS. Or you can self-host using our recommended stack!

Ghost - The Professional Publishing Platform

Note however that the pricing for Self-Hosting in that document makes some assumptions that may not apply to you - and are designed to sway you towards choosing Ghost Pro. It's perfectly fine if you prefer that!

You should note that:

• the features available to you on Ghost Pro depend on the tier but on self hosted they are available to you straight away
• by following the steps above you reduce base hosting cost to $6/mo + VAT
• using CDN only becomes advantageous for very busy sites, Fastly do offer a free tier, and they are not the only provider on the market
• email newsletter sending even with Mailgun has lower-tiered pricing available, and custom integrations with other providers are also out there
• fully automated backups can be enabled on Digital Ocean for just 20% extra
• the built-in Pintura image editor is nifty, but hardly required

As you grow you can always increase the Droplet size or invest in additional services such as CDN or advanced integrations mentioned above.

The obvious disadvantage here is that hosting your own Ghost publication requires not only more time to set up, but also will require regular maintenance, and occasional troubleshooting. While it doesn't take a lot of time, it does require ongoing commitment.

Some documentation on this subject can be found below:

How to Keep Ubuntu 22.04 Servers Updated | DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean makes it possible for you to run as many droplets as you need for a project with one click. However, it’s more straightforward to deploy a serve…

DigitalOceanAlex Garnett

Ghost Docs

Everything you need to know about working with the Ghost professional publishing platform.

Ghost - The Professional Publishing Platform

How to: Automate Let’s Encrypt Wildcard Certificates

Learn how to automate your systems for issuing and renewing Let’s Encrypt wildcard certificates

O'Brien Cloud EngineeringTom O’Brien

That's it! I hope this will help any small blog owners out there!

Do you still want to self-host... but not go through these steps? We get you!
Get in touch with us using the button below and we'll be happy to help you out.

Let's take a look at Youtube's recommended settings for uploading media to their platform. From here we can apply these settings with FFmpeg.

ffmpeg \                # Calling the binary
-i input.mp4 \          # Input video file
-r 30000/1001 \         # Set the frame rate - optional
-vf scale="1920:1080" \ # Resize video - optional
-codec:v libx264 \      # X264 Video Codec
-crf 21 \               # Video Quality
-bf 2 \                 # Maximum 2 B-frames as per guideline
-flags +cgop \          # Closed GOP as per guideline
-pix_fmt yuv420p \      # Chroma subsampling 4:2:0 as per guideline
-c:a aac \              # Fraunhofer FDK AAC codec library
-b:a 128k \             # Audio Bitrate
-ac 2 \                 # Audio channels
-r:a 44100 \            # Audio samplerate
-map 0:v:0 \            # First file : video : first track
-map 0:a:0 \            # First file : audio : first track 
-movflags faststart \   # Put MOOV atom at the front of the file
output.mp4

Command Breakdown: Converting video with specific settings

This FFmpeg command takes an MP4 video (input.mp4) and converts it to another MP4 file (output.mp4) with some specific settings:

Input and Output:

• -i input.mp4: This tells FFmpeg to use the file named "input.mp4" as the source video.
• output.mp4: This specifies the name of the output file, which will also be in MP4 format.

Video Processing (Optional):

• -r 30000/1001: This option is used to set the frame rate of the output video to 30 frames per second (fps). This is optional, and if omitted, the original frame rate will be kept.
• -vf scale="1920:1080": This option resizes the video to a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. This is also optional, and the video will remain its original size if not specified.

Video Encoding:

• -codec:v libx264: This specifies the video codec used for encoding. Here, libx264 is used, which is a popular choice for high-quality H.264 video encoding.
• -crf 21: This sets the Constant Rate Factor (CRF) for video quality. Lower values result in higher quality (larger file size), and higher values result in lower quality (smaller file size). 21 is a commonly used value for good quality videos.
• -bf 2: This sets the maximum number of B-frames to 2. B-frames are used for better compression, but using too many can affect compatibility with some players. Following encoding guidelines, this is set to 2.
• -flags +cgop: This enables Closed GOP (Group of Pictures) encoding. Following guidelines, this is enabled for better compatibility with some players.
• -pix_fmt yuv420p: This sets the pixel format to YUV 4:2:0, which is a common color space used for video compression. Following guidelines, this format is chosen.

Audio Encoding:

• -c:a aac: This specifies the audio codec used for encoding. Here, aac is used, which is a popular and efficient audio codec.
• -b:a 128k: This sets the audio bitrate to 128 kilobits per second (kbps). This is a common choice for good quality audio.
• -ac 2: This sets the number of audio channels to 2 (stereo).
• -r:a 44100: This sets the audio sample rate to 44.1 kHz, which is a standard audio sample rate.

Mapping Streams (Optional):

• -map 0:v:0: This tells FFmpeg to copy the first video stream (stream 0) from the input file (indicated by the "0") to the output file.
• -map 0:a:0: Similar to the previous option, this copies the first audio stream (stream 0) from the input file to the output file.

Output Optimization:

• -movflags faststart: This places the MOOV atom (which contains essential information about the video) at the beginning of the file. This can improve seeking performance in some players.

Need some help with online video delivery, storage and processing? Get in touch with us using the button below and we'll be happy to help you out.

FFmpeg is a powerful tool for processing audio and video files, but its commands can appear complex at first glance. Let's break down the process of understanding an FFmpeg command into simpler steps:

Identify the basic function

Most FFmpeg commands start with an action verb, like ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.avi. Here, ffmpeg is the program name, -i specifies the input file (input.mp4), and output.avi is the output filename.

Break down the options

The -i option is followed by various flags and parameters that control FFmpeg's behavior. These can be categorized into:

• Input options: These specify properties of the input file, like -i input.mp4 which tells FFmpeg to use "input.mp4" as the source.
• Output options: These control the output file's format, quality, and other aspects. For example, .avi in the command specifies the output format as AVI.
• Codec options: Codecs are used for encoding and decoding audio/video data. FFmpeg can use different codecs depending on your needs.

Understand common options

Some frequently used options include:

• -c:v codec: This specifies the video codec to use for encoding/decoding (e.g., -c:v libx264 for H.264 video).
• -c:a codec: Similar to -c:v but for audio codecs (e.g., -c:a libmp3lame for MP3 audio).
• -b:v bitrate: Sets the video bitrate, which affects video quality and file size (e.g., -b:v 5M for 5 Mbps bitrate).
• -ar samplerate: Sets the audio sample rate, which affects audio quality (e.g., -ar 44100 for 44.1 kHz sample rate).

Need some help with online video delivery, storage and processing? Get in touch with us using the button below and we'll be happy to help you out.

Imagine a Swiss Army knife for multimedia. That's essentially what FFmpeg is. It's a free and open-source collection of tools that can handle virtually any audio, video, and image format you throw at it. From basic conversions to advanced editing and streaming, FFmpeg handles more media formats than you can shake a stick at.

This series aims to unlock the potential of FFmpeg for users of all levels. Whether you're a complete beginner or a seasoned techie, here's what you can gain:

What will this series cover?

We'll explore the following topics to get you up and running:

• Installation: Downloading and setting up FFmpeg on different operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux).
• Basic Commands: Mastering the essential commands for conversions, basic edits, and playback.
• Advanced Techniques: Delving into filters, scripting, and automation for power users.
• Real-world Applications: Putting your newfound skills to practice with practical use cases like streaming, editing, and format conversions.

By the end of this series, you'll be wielding FFmpeg with confidence, transforming your multimedia experience from frustration to freedom. Stay tuned for the next post, where we'll guide you through the installation process and get you started with your first FFmpeg commands.

Need some help with online video delivery, storage and processing? Get in touch with us using the button below and we'll be happy to help you out.

While it's excellent in many ways, Ghost also comes with some built-in limitations. You can modify and customise it by creating new or modifying existing themes, but this can often be cumbersome especially if you don't have strong technical skills.

One such limitation is the length of the author bio. Ghost limits the author bio field to only 200 characters - and this is often too short if you wish to provide more details! Ghost users and admins have long requested for this limit to be extended. This has however not been yet implemented and may never be.

As a workaround you can create your own author bio as a page, even with a separate custom channel page to mimic the original author page.

This works best if you don't have many authors, and it also falls back to original behaviour for all authors who don't have a custom page.

About Routes and Slugs

To understand what's about to happen here you need to understand that the URL schema for Ghost can be customised for your publication. It is defined in a routes.yaml file. By default it looks like this:

routes:

collections:
  /:
    permalink: /{slug}/
    template: index

taxonomies:
  tag: /tag/{slug}/
  author: /author/{slug}/

Routes file broadly describes what URL will any page have, relative to the domain name. In the default behaviour above all posts and pages will have URL such as:

https://example.com/post-slug

and importantly, the author's page will have the URL such as:

https://example.com/author/author-slug

Ghost Themes - Dynamic URLs & Routing

Build dedicated URL structures using Ghost’s dynamic routing system, for custom homepages, podcasts, categories and more.

Ghost - The Professional Publishing Platform

Routes are designed to be modified to your needs whether you self-host Ghost or use a hosted service through Ghost.org. This allows for powerful customisations when it comes to organising and theming your publication. Furthermore while a slug for a post or a page will be auto-generated from a title, you can also modify it yourself when you publish or edit a page.

As a quirk of how Ghost evaluates routes and resolves conflicts, if a page exists with the same slug as an author bio the page will win out. We will leverage this fact to replace the standard bio with a custom page instead.

Replacing author's bio page

To prepare first download the current routes.yaml file from your Ghost publication. To do so log in as a publication admin /ghost/ URL:

https://example.com/ghost/

Navigate to Settings -> Advanced -> Labs and click Open.
Then, select the Beta Features tab. You will then find the option to download - and later upload - the routes file.

Click on "Download current routes" link and save the file. Now create a backup copy of the file so that you can go back to the original state if you need to.

Update the taxonomy route for authors

We will be replacing the author page with a regular page. The page and post slugs can be changed at the publishing stage, but they can't contain slashes. As such we will first make sure that the route for authors goes straight to author slug, same as a page. In your routes.yaml file replace the default author taxonomy:

author: /author/{slug}/

with the following

author: /{slug}/

Upload the modified routes.yaml file in the Labs section of your Ghost Settings.

Now navigate to an author's page to validate that the URL is in the correct format:

https://example.com/author-slug

Verify author slug

By default the author slug for Ghost staff is their first name, but it's always worth checking. In Ghost Settings page navigate to the Staff section. Hover over the user to see the profile link - it will be "View Profile" if you're editing your own profile, or "Edit" for other members.

In the profile section the slug will show on the bottom of the left hand-side column. You can change the slug here if you so wish. Take note of the author slug - you will need this for the next step.

Create a new page with a matching slug

Now navigate to Ghost admin page and click on "Pages". Create a new page with author's name as title. Ghost will automatically generate a post slug for this page, but it's not likely to match the author slug. Open the side panel and rewrite the page slug to match the author slug and publish.

Now navigate to the author's bio page again and confirm that it has been replaced by your custom page.

Going a step further

The author's page has now been fully replaced by a regular page, but what if you still want to be able to see all of the author's posts like with a default author's page?

Ghost only loads information on a page depending on a context, so while not entirely impossible it is difficult to show posts by an author in a context of a page.

However it is entirely possible, using the channel controller, to create a new route that will display author's posts as if it was the standard author's bio page. The only problem here is that this needs to be added to routes.yaml file for each author slug and this will not dynamically update.

The format for this is as follows:

routes:

  /author-slug/posts:
    template: author
    data: author.author-slug
    controller: channel
    filter: primary_author:author-slug

Note here that because the slug is not dynamic here the author-slug needs to be replaced with an actual slug for each staff member.

routes:
  /tom/posts/:
    template: author
    data: author.tom
    controller: channel
    filter: primary_author:tom
  /jj/posts/:
    template: author
    data: author.jj
    controller: channel
    filter: primary_author:jj

collections:
  /:
    permalink: /{slug}/
    template: index

taxonomies:
  tag: /tag/{slug}/
  author: /{slug}/

To make it easy to navigate you can then add a posts button to the author's bio page:

That's it! Now you have a custom author's page on your ghost publication without losing a taxonomy-like page... and you can make it as long as you wish!

See this in action for yourself by clicking on the author link in this post or by clicking here.

Does this seem too bothersome and complicated to do yourself? No problem!
Get in touch with us using the button below and we'll be happy to help you out.

Further reading

Bio Length For users

Hello, First time posting. Wondering how we can go about changing the bio length on a self hosted instance? 200 characters is awful short. I seem to remember finding something way back about just changing the value in /current/core/server/data/schema/schema.js, but this doesn’t seem to be affecting any change. thanks!

Ghost ForumDouglasWelcome

Change character length of author bios

Hi, We need to have longer bios than the 200 char limit, we did used to change this within the ghost.min js file but this doesn’t work anymore in the latest version (3.3.0), has this been moved? where do we now change it?

Ghost ForumEmma_Rayfield

Change the URL for tags and authors

Transform tags into topics, authors into contributors, or any into any other terms by updating your site’s taxonomy.

TutorialsTeam Ghost

Ghost Themes - Dynamic URLs & Routing

Build dedicated URL structures using Ghost’s dynamic routing system, for custom homepages, podcasts, categories and more.

Ghost - The Professional Publishing Platform