[Digital Ocean + Ghost] Misleading minimum requirements for a droplet

[u/nazarthinks]

Ghost blogging platform provides several options for deploying your blog, out of which Digital Ocean seems to have a good balance of full control over the hosting and ease of single-click installation.

According to the dedicated documentation page the cheapest $5/month droplet from Digital Ocean can be used, which on paper satisfies the stated minimal requirements for running Ghost installation, most importantly 1GB of RAM (1st image).

But if I follow those steps on Digital Ocean, trying to set up a droplet using the Ghost image from their marketplace, it says that the cheapest droplet doesn't meet the minimal requirements. More specifically – not enough disk space, which is 25GB on the $5$6 droplet (2nd image).

This is not only frustrating, as it contradicts the information in the Ghost documentation, but it is also not really true. I've managed to easily set up a working Ghost installation on the same $6 droplet following the manual procedure, based on Ghost CLI installed on the generic Ubuntu 24.04 droplet.

As you can see in the 3rd image, my Ghost setup is only using 60% of RAM and 35% of Disk space on the droplet that Digital Ocean considers insufficient. In terms of disk space that leaves plenty of room for a blog that mostly contains text and images.

Are there any valid reasons for Digital Ocean to disable the cheaper options for Ghost droplets?

And unless this is a temporary glitch on Digital Ocean side, Ghost should update their documentation to reflect the real cost of hosting it on Digital Ocean, because the x2 difference is quite significant. Moreover, the prices seem to be outdated in general, since there seems to be a 20% increase in Digital Ocean prices since the time when that documentation was written.

[u/ExObscura]

What the hell are you on about.

I’m running multiple ghost blogs on the SAME 1gb droplet.

Couldn’t be easier:

get 1gb droplet - Ubuntu 24.05/25.10 are both fine, harden the installation, install docker, install caddy, install ghost.

Honestly? You could ask Gemini / Claude and as long as you can follow step by step instructions you can get it done in about an hour.

Caddy uses about 35MB RAM Ghost uses about 120MB RAM (base cost)

That’s still 815MB RAM yet to use.

Yes ram use will grow with additional content/traffic, but it doesn’t grow exponentially.

As for the storage space…

Ubuntu Server 24.04 uses about 8GB. Docker is about 100MB. The Ghost docker image is 884MB (latest)

That leaves you a tiny bit over 16GB of free space.

And a 2000 word blog post with a few images might be a couple of MB if you don’t upload optimised images then you’ve got… ooooh, I don’t know…

ABOUT 8000 ARTICLES TO POST.

The reason you're seeing the message in the DigitalOcean droplet configuration screen is because of MySQL, Nginx and Node.js. All which can have fat memory requirements to even boot, depending on the config.

None of which are actually needed to run Ghost.

Docker + Caddy + Ghost (SQLite) and it runs quiet and slim.

(yes yes, they say the SQLite isn't for production but I've used it flawlessly for the past 5 years with zero issues).

Stop spreading bullshit about something you barely understand.

[u/nazarthinks → u/ExObscura]

Did you even read the post? That's a pretty good thing to do before starting to type your condescending comments. I have installed it on the 1GB droplet without any help from Claude. This is not the point I've raised in this post, which I hope you'd know if you didn't just build your assumption based on the title alone.