What happens between entering a domain and having a live, HTTPS-secured Ghost blog about a minute later.
Six steps, all of them visible in the panel while they run. No black box, no queue you cannot see.
Create an A record for the domain you own, pointing at our server. The panel shows you the exact record to create and waits for it to resolve.
Not a folder on a shared server — a real isolated container with its own filesystem, its own process table, and the CPU, memory and disk your plan allows.
Upstream Ghost on the Node version Ghost supports, with its own MySQL 8 database and a password that exists only inside your container.
We generate an nginx virtual host for your domain, with a page cache in front of Ghost so a busy post is served from memory rather than re-rendered every time.
A Let's Encrypt certificate is requested as soon as your domain resolves to us, and renewed on a timer from then on. Nothing to configure and nothing to remember.
Your Ghost admin panel is at /ghost/ on your own domain. It is the Ghost admin you already know, because it is the real thing.
Measured on a real build, not estimated. Times vary a little with load, but this is the shape of it.
| Stage | Typical time | What is happening |
|---|---|---|
| Container launch | ~5 s | A private container is created from a prebuilt image and started |
| Ghost + MySQL | ~20 s | The database is initialised and Ghost is configured for your domain |
| Web server | ~2 s | An nginx virtual host is generated and the configuration reloaded |
| DNS check | ~5 s | We confirm your domain resolves to us before requesting a certificate |
| Certificate | ~10 s | A Let's Encrypt certificate is issued and the site switches to HTTPS |
| Total | ~48 s | From clicking create to a live HTTPS site |
The one thing we cannot speed up is DNS propagation. If your record is new, the internet may take minutes to hours to agree on it — set your TTL to 300 seconds before you migrate and that window shrinks to about five minutes.
Less than most people expect. You need a domain you control and access to its DNS settings. That is the whole list.
You do not need:
Nothing breaks, and you do not have to start again. The build deliberately does not block on DNS: your site is created and served over plain HTTP, and the certificate is issued automatically the moment your domain resolves to us.
This matters because DNS is the one part of the process nobody can control. A build that failed because a registrar was slow would be a build that punishes you for something that is not your fault.
Worth stating plainly, because it is what decides whether we are the right host:
Your Ghost admin panel at /ghost/ on your own domain, a site served through an
nginx page cache that took measured time-to-first-byte from 63 ms to 0.4 ms on
cached responses, nightly backups kept outside your container, and per-site traffic
statistics that count readers without tracking them across days.
From there it is Ghost — write, publish, install a theme, and let us worry about the certificate renewals. See what is included or compare the plans.
About one minute of build time once your domain resolves to us. In a measured run the container launch, Ghost install, web server configuration and certificate issuance completed in roughly 48 seconds end to end. The part that takes longer is DNS propagation, which is outside our control and depends on your registrar and TTL.
A domain you control and access to its DNS settings. You do not need a server, a database, an SSL certificate, or any command line experience. You also do not need to install Ghost yourself — that is what the build does.
The build does not block on it. Your site is created and served over plain HTTP, and the certificate is issued automatically as soon as the domain resolves to us. You do not have to start over or contact support.
Yes. Your Ghost admin is at /ghost/ on your own domain and it is the standard, unmodified Ghost interface. We do not replace it with our own editor or restrict which settings you can change.
Yes. Each step reports its own status in the panel as it happens — container, Ghost install, web server configuration, DNS check and certificate — so a build that fails tells you which step failed rather than just failing.
Yes. Every site runs in its own Linux container with its own filesystem, its own process table, its own MySQL 8 database and its own CPU, memory and disk limits. Nothing is shared with another customer, so one busy blog cannot slow down another.
No mystery layer. This is the whole stack behind your site.
Your blog, your domain, your database — running in about a minute.