Straight answers, including the ones that are inconvenient for us.
Yes. We do not hand out subdomains on this platform, so you will need a domain you control. You create one A record pointing at our server, using the exact address the panel shows you after you sign in, and we take it from there.
About a minute once your DNS resolves to us. We launch the container, install Ghost, write the web server configuration and issue your certificate, and you watch each step happen as it runs.
Yes. We run a shared SMTP relay, and once you switch it on for a site from the panel, Ghost newsletters, member sign-in links and staff invitations all send normally. It is off by default on a new site, so turn it on before you invite your first member.
Yes. Extra sites are sold as an add-on, so you can add one blog at a time on top of whatever your plan already covers instead of jumping to the next tier.
Nothing is deleted. After the grace period your site goes into maintenance mode and comes straight back when the invoice is settled. We never delete a blog for non-payment.
Archives are written outside your container on the host, and how many we keep depends on your plan. They are not currently copied off-site, so treat them as protection against a mistake in your blog rather than against a datacentre failure.
Upstream Ghost, unmodified, with the admin panel you already know. Each blog runs its own Ghost process, its own Node runtime and its own MySQL 8 database in a private container, so nothing is shared with another customer.
Your blog, your domain, your database — running in about a minute.