Benifits: Download the software and install it on your own web server.

Get community support on the Ghost forums Manage all your own updates and code

repo

###Key differences between Ghost and WordPress:

  1. Non-Profit vs For Profit:
  2. Type of Open-Source: WordPress uses the GNU or General Public License, Ghost is MIT open source license
  3. Node.js vs PHP

Using a modern web framework, ghost is not only light weight and robust but fairly simple to get set up and running within a matter of hours.

First, setup your Amazon Web Services EC2 instance

###AWS Console: Create instance - download key

sudo chmod 600 /path/to/amazon.pem

start instance
r+click connect

ssh -i /path/to/amazon/awskey.pem ec2-user@[public-dns]

###Install Ghost

Update the operating system:

sudo yum update

Install C compiler

sudo yum install gcc
sudo yum install gcc-c++ compat-gcc-32 compat-gcc-32-c++

Install node.js

wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf node-latest.tar.gz
cd node-directory

Use the following commands to compile and install node.js

./configure  
make  
sudo make install
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node /usr/bin/node
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/npm /usr/bin/npm
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node-waf /usr/bin/node-waf

Download and install Ghost

mkdir -p /var/www/
cd /var/www/
wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip
unzip -d ghost [Ghost file you downloaded]
cd ghost/
sudo /usr/local/bin/npm install --production

Configure and start Ghost

sudo vim config.example.js

Under the “Default Configuration” section

change "host:" 0.0.0.0
change "port:" to port 80

##Create Ghost User

useradd ghost
sudo passwd ghost

Create a password

chown -R ghost:ghost /var/www/ghost/

Now to start Ghost, you will need to log into your “ghost” user.

su - ghost
cd /var/www/ghost/

Now that you are logged in with your “ghost” user you can start Ghost:

npm start --production

Now go to your amazon URL and Ghost is up! Go to yoururl.com/ghost/ to setup your admin user and you have a free Ghost install!

Possible Errors: 1. Permissions 0777 for ‘/Documents/AmazonKey.pem’ are too open. It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others. This private key will be ignored.

sudo chmod 600 ~/Documents/AmazonKey.pem

Further reading - [hosting-and-installing-ghost] (http://www.ghostforbeginners.com/hosting-and-installing-ghost/)