Speed

In order to understand how your Ghost site is kept so responsive and secure, you need to understand a little about the architecture that we use behind the scenes.

The biggest problem with running a high-impact Ghost site is that it’s very hard to predict surges in demand. If an article goes viral the server is overloaded and many users end up with a broken link or, at best, a poor user experience, because the link overloads the server and makes it unresponsive.


First Solution: Increase Capacity Permanently
The second solution is to increase capacity permanently. This is extremely expensive and still doesn’t solve the problem, because it’s never possible to know in advance how much traffic an article is going to attract.
Second Solution: Increase Capacity in Advance

There are three ways to deal with this. The first is to attempt to predict future demand and increase the number of servers in advance. This may work for advertising campaigns which are known about in advance, but it can’t work for links from other sites.

Best Solution: Automatically Increase Capacity using Kubernetes
The third solution, which is the one we offer, is to use the power of Kubernetes to automatically increase the number of servers on demand. Using this system, we will increase the number of VPSs (virtual private servers) as needed. This guarantees that you will never be left with blog pages that don’t load just when you need them most.
Accurate Monitoring

Another huge benefit of this system is that we have detailed information about the memory and CPU usage of the VPSs which host your site. We can share this information with you to help you understand the exact nature of the spikes in demand which you are experiencing – for example, you can see where they are happening, how large they are and how fast they build up. This insight will help you to plan in the future and to model future events, such as an advertising campaign, or a particular type of article.

Using a Content Delivery Network

A common way of speeding up the delivery of large static files such as images is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Unfortunately, a poor-quality CDN can create more problems than it solves. We use the Google Cloud CDN, which is consistently rated as one of the fastest (source: CDNperf.com). Other services, such as Ghost(Pro) don't give any information about which CDN they use.