There are a ton of different services that will help you host a blog where you can write, podcast, and share your thoughts and ideas. I encourage you all to do it!
I write on WordPress.com (affiliate link) because I don’t like to worry about technical stuff. It makes hosting your blog very simple. You don’t have to worry about updating plugins or behind the scene stuff. WordPress.com does all the background stuff for you, including hosting your domain name. They even give you an option to blog for free as long as you don’t care about having WordPress.com in your domain name and a few ads on your site.
Trying Out Ghost
Lately, I’ve been interested in a new blogging platform called Ghost. In their comparison to WordPress, they claim to be much faster and have better tools for writers. The basic plan costs about twice as much as WordPress.com. My friends at careerhackers.com recently moved to Ghost and I was curious to see what it was like. I decided to give their two-week free trial a spin and see what it was like.
Speed
In my trial, I found that Ghost pages did seem to load faster than WordPress.com. I really like that. This helps your pages rank higher in search results and gives a better experience for the reader.
But when I ran identical posts through Google’s speed test, it actually showed my Ghost post loaded slower!
Post-Editor
Ghost’s online editor seemed to be a bit less confusing than WordPress.com.
Email Subscriptions
Ghost also has a cool subscription tool that lets writers easily start charging for their content. And Ghost doesn’t take a cut of the fees. WordPress.com has this too, but they take a cut of the money you earn.
Ghost also allows you to customize what goes out to your email subscribers. At WordPress.com, I cannot control what posts go out to my subscribers. Any new blog post will go out to my subscribers. I don’t always like this. I have to be more cognizant of what I write and my writing schedule. It also causes problems for me when updating old pages.
Occasionally on WordPress.com, an update to an old post will trigger a new email to go out to my email subscribers, when really it should just be an update to the old blog post.
Integrations
The problem with Ghost is that they have much fewer integrations than WordPress.com. If I want to start selling products on my site, either physical or digital, I don’t see an easy way to do that with Ghost.
WordPress.com has many built-in integrations that make this possible. With Ghost, I cannot easily have a sidebar with my latest podcast for example.
WordPress.com seems more future-proof at this point.
Mobile Editing
Another drawback to Ghost is the fact that I couldn’t edit posts on my phone. Often times I will publish or edit posts from my phone. This wasn’t possible on Ghost.
Your Thoughts?
I’m curious what your experience has been like on different blogging platforms. Have you tried Ghost? Let me know in the comments below.
Aaron Olson 