Yeah, I’ve been paying $5 (or is it $10?) a month for my Ghost blog on a digital ocean droplet. It’s not worth it, my plan is to move to a static site generator (probably CloudFront -> S3 deployed via GitHub actions in a private repo) at some point. The features of Ghost don’t really matter to me and I hate maintaining the install/updating. Ghost feels like it’s moved more into “self-hosted substack”-territory which I have zero interest in, my blog posts are all public. Also, you can’t hack static files so security isn’t a worry with SSG which is super nice.

Not sure which SSG I’ll go with, when I was younger I would have written my own but now I’ll just pick something off the shelf that has nice themes lol.

I ran ZoneMinder for years before buying a Reolink NVM and now I couldn’t be happier. I’m a huge self-host-er but unless you want to babysit it ZoneMinder is a pain to self host. I ran it in docker, I ran it on raw metal, I tried multiple plugins/configs. Nothing beat the plug and play of a Reolink NVM. I say this as someone with multiple servers and ~150TB of storage locally.

Skip the headache and buy something off the shelf for this.