Case Study: Ghost achieves on-demand scaling with DigitalOcean

How Ghost Migrated From Dedicated Servers to DigitalOcean

Ghost is the company behind Ghost(Pro), a hosted version of the open‑source blogging platform that serves tens of thousands of blogs and about 100 million requests per month. By late 2014 their dedicated‑server setup could not scale fast enough (new hardware took ~2 months), risking growth and service quality; they needed on‑demand scaling, enough RAM, strong support, and a zero‑downtime migration with minimal refactor.

They migrated Ghost(Pro) to DigitalOcean Droplets and used SaltStack for inventory and rapid provisioning, UFW/iptables for public firewalling, Tinc VPN for a secure private mesh, and MySQL replication (master/slave then master/master) to avoid downtime. DNS cutover was handled via CloudFlare; backups, monitoring, and CI were integrated. The result: a successful zero‑downtime migration that enabled minute‑scale scaling, faster deployments (from weeks to days), easy rollback capability, and lower operational overhead.

Ghost

Sebastian Gierlinger

Senior DevOps Engineer