Post started Wednesday, April 28th, 2021.
On Tuesday, April 27th, I managed to get my Ghost instance up. It was a pain.
...but only because of my stupidity. Let me explain.
I started installing Ghost that morning, my time. I figured it'd need a reverse proxy, so, to try and speed things up, I simply copied the Apache config file for a different service on my server and edited that copy as necessary. I edited the port...
But didn't think to check the protocol.
See, the other service I happen to use that runs through a reverse proxy, for some weird reason, connects to the internal socket over HTTPS. Not HTTP, like Ghost was calling for.
Did I realise this at the time? No. No I didn't. So I spent over 5 hours trying to troubleshoot a HTTP 503 over a config file.
I uninstalled Ghost, and reinstalled it. Big mistake. Server completely locked up.
As a result, I couldn't do anything about Ghost, until I got home, to be able to force-reboot the server. The Ghost install went fine afterwards. Up until it started throwing errors at me while trying to start Ghost because somehow I typed "htts" for the url instead of "https" for its config.
Oh and also, all of a sudden, Apache and Ghost don't want to work when i set "url" to https. I have literally no clue why.
So far, Ghost has been nice. It's significantly more responsive than WordPress (what this site happens to run on!), and the editor is great, but it'll take a while before i'm used to not having the sidepane there the whole time.
Also, I'm very delighted that the admin interface has a native dark mode. WordPress needs a plugin just to pull that off, which is mildly infuriating.
To be honest, if it weren't for the Contact Form 7 plugin for WordPress, I wouldn't hesitate to switch over to Ghost entirely.
If I had to give Ghost a score, out of 10.. I'd give it.. a 9.
5/5/2021: As I write this, it appears Ghost has gotten a little slower. Don't know why, though.