I moved No CS Degree from Ghost to Astro
I just cancelled Ghost after 7+ years.
I've moved No CS Degree, my collection of 200 interviews with self-taught developers, to a markdown site built in Astro hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Here's why:
• It's now 100% free to run
• I can easily edit pages in bulk with Claude Code
• I can make the website look exactly how I want it to
Cost
I'll be saving $75 a month this way (or about £50). I was paying $900 or about £600 to host No CS Degree, a project which hasn't made much money for years and which I tried and failed to sell. It's a lot of money to spend on an inactive project.
Admittedly, I could have had a slightly cheaper annual plan but it's still a big saving and now I can put that money right into my pension or spend it on growth.
Hosting a website on Cloudflare Pages is free and I've moved my email list to Kit, which is also free up to 10,000 subscribers.
Ease of editing
Once you publish a blog for a while you gather a lot of clutter. I started No CS Degree in 2019 so there was lots of content that I wanted to change. Here are some things I accomplished in a few seconds with Claude Code.
• I deleted a lot of banner images to courses
• I removed about 50 links to the job board which doesn't exist any more
• I removed about 30 affiliate links which are inactive now or haven't made me money in years
This probably saved me about 5-10 hours. Let's take the example of removing links to the job board:
In the past I would have had to search on Google for posts containing a link to the job board and put them all in a spreadsheet. Then with Ghost I would have had to log in to each page, find the link, delete it, come out of it and go into another page. Maybe I could have done it with an API but with Claude Code this is all done effortlessly.
Control over the website's look
Another huge bonus is that I can choose exactly how I want the website to look. I just talk to Claude. I don't have to work with a Ghost theme or deal with its constraints.
To be fair, my new website doesn't look drastically different. The page speeds before were already good so there's not a dramatic change there. But it's great being able to talk to Claude and make changes to the website design this way. I can just say "add this email form to the bottom of every interview" and it does it like magic.
Conclusion
I'm pleased with my decision to move. I don't want to bash Ghost too much as it is very good software. I could possibly have kept a minimal plan to keep the CMS and send posts over the API to my custom site. But I figured editing markdown pages in Claude and the cost savings were worth it.
I would host your blog on Ghost if you want to email-gate your content so people have to log in to read articles. This is what I do with my High Signal website - if you want to read the interviews with founders, you need to log in.
That's a pretty good reason to keep Ghost but I'm planning a new direction for No CS Degree. But for personal sites, directories or blogs, I think a fully static site on Astro is best. My next task is making this site into a custom site on Astro so I can better show off my ghostwriting services and my other experience.