Blogging platform Ghost is ditching its servers and moving Pro blogs to DigitalOcean

Ghost, the startup behind the Ghost open-source blogging software, today announced that it will start using startup DigitalOcean’s cloud infrastructure to run the Ghost(Pro) premium hosting service.

The move is “probably the biggest thing that’s happened from a business point of view since the Kickstarter campaign,” Ghost founder and chief executive John O’Nolan told VentureBeat in an email.

The nearly 30,000 Ghost(Pro) blogs currently run on Ghost’s own fleet of Dell servers in a data center in the United Kingdom, but now those blogs are getting HTTPS support — a frequent customer request — and better performance thanks to the migration to DigitalOcean, O’Nolan wrote in a blog post today on the news.

For those setting up the open-source Ghost software on their own, “DigitalOcean has been (by far) the most popular choice,” O’Nolan wrote.

That exemplifies the continuing appeal of DigitalOcean, despite that its cloud is much smaller than, say, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. DigitalOcean has received credit for being simple relative to those other clouds, and last month it was the second largest hosting company in the world by one metric.

London-based Ghost started in 2013 and is structured as a nonprofit organization. Following the 2013 Kickstarter campaign through which it raised $350,000, the startup has paid for its operations with revenue from its Ghost(Pro) hosting service.