Publishing Stack
The Publishing Stack brings this topic into one place so the full arc is easy to follow. Start anywhere, or move through the pieces in order to build a cleaner read on publishing stack. The Series Ghost CMS: What It Actually Does in 2026CustomclankerPicking Your Publishing Stack: The Decision FrameworkCustomclankerWordPress
Publishing Stack
Google has said — repeatedly, publicly, on the record — that it does not penalize content for being AI-generated. Google has also rolled out a series of updates that obliterated sites publishing large volumes of AI content. Both statements are true. The distinction that matters is between AI content and mass-produced thin
Publishing Stack
Self-hosting Ghost on a Hetzner VPS managed through Coolify is the cheapest way to run a professional-grade publishing operation — under $10/month for what Ghost(Pro) charges $25-199/month to deliver. You get full ownership of your data, your code, and your infrastructure. The trade-off is that you become the
Publishing Stack
You can write the best newsletter in the world and none of it matters if your emails land in spam. Email deliverability — the percentage of your sends that reach the actual inbox, not the junk folder, not the promotions tab, not the void — is the infrastructure problem that sits underneath
Publishing Stack
These are the three platforms that come up every time someone decides to start publishing online. The comparison gets done wrong almost every time because it starts from the assumption that they're interchangeable — that you can line up features in a table and pick the winner. They are
Publishing Stack
Beehiiv was built by people who scaled Morning Brew to millions of subscribers, and the product reflects that origin story down to its bones. Every feature — referral programs, an ad network, recommendation engines, granular analytics — exists to make the subscriber number go up. This is not a writing tool that
Publishing Stack
Kit — the platform formerly known as ConvertKit, rebranded in 2024 — is an email marketing tool that evolved into a creator publishing platform. The key word is "evolved." The email list is still the center of gravity. Landing pages, digital product sales, automations, and the Creator Network all orbit
Publishing Stack
Substack made starting a newsletter a zero-friction decision. You sign up, you write, you hit publish, and your post goes to inboxes and lives on the web. No DNS configuration. No theme selection. No Mailgun setup. No hosting bills. The trade-off for that simplicity is a 10% cut of your
Publishing Stack
WordPress powers somewhere north of 40% of the web. That number gets cited in every WordPress article ever written, usually as proof that WordPress is fine. But market share is a lagging indicator — it tells you what people chose five years ago, not what they'd choose today. In
Publishing Stack
This is the last article in the series, and if you've read the rest, you already know the individual tools. Ghost, WordPress, Substack, Kit, Beehiiv — each has a detailed breakdown. What's left is the part most people get wrong: making the actual decision. Not "which
Publishing Stack
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform built on Node.js that handles content, newsletters, and memberships in one package. It positions itself as the "professional publishing" alternative to WordPress and Substack — clean, focused, no plugin chaos. The honest take: Ghost delivers on that promise if you understand what