Writing on Substack - 2 Weeks Later
Migrating from Ghost Blog to Substack : Sharvesh.com 4.0
2 weeks ago I switched from writing on Ghost.io to Substack. I still really like Ghost and think its the best option if you want a custom website to write blogs on but it wasn’t for me.
Ghost is more customisable and looks better as a blog but it was kind of like having a mansion on a private island located off the coast of Canada. Sure its cool that you have a mansion and private island but you are living hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest city and can’t access the luxuries of living in a city like fast internet, public amenities, medical infrastructure, entertainment, culture, cuisines and more.
Substack on the other hand is like living in an average sized apartment in the middle of a large city. Sure your home isn’t as big and private but you have so much more action going on.
Ghost is amazing if you already have a large audience of people who are regularly reading your posts but substack is amazing for growing or just getting started with a small audience.
Also I suspect that Ghost wasn’t able to send emails properly to people’s inboxes in gmail. I subscribed to my own newsletter using my other gmail address and found that my newsletters were gone (either in spam, trash, not received or under promotions in gmail sorting which means people won’t check it that often. On the other hand, substack seems to work much better than ghost when it comes to sending emails.
One drawback is customisation of the site as you need to select from a small selection of pre-existing themes but everything else is great. There is a fee of $50 to use a custom domain on your substack but that is better than paying $100 a year for Ghost or whatever. Also Ghost has a fixed cost for sending newsletters based on your audience size (for paid newsletters) while Substack is completely free and takes a percentage of paid newsletter revenue. But that doesn’t apply to this site.
TLDR: Ghost customisable, remote website, issues sending emails. Substack less customisable, more discovery features, no issues sending emails.