I sold my Ghost host, Gloat

Late last week I signed the Purchaser Agreement to sell Gloat, a small, independent Ghost host I created back in 2020.

It has been bought by Jannis from MagicPages, a similarly independent host run by a single founder.

Five years of hosting Ghost sites has been a blast and a challenge, and I'm very happy to have been able to offer an alternative to customers and carve out a little chunk of the Ghost hosting market.

The beginnings

In mid-2020 I began offering a self-hosted installation service, where I would set up Ghost on customers' DigitalOcean servers.

It was originally called Install Ghost for Me.

Almost immediately I got an email from Ghost CEO, John, who said I couldn't use the word "Ghost" in the name. I renamed it to Gloat two days later.

I charged a one-time fee (at launch $59, then $99), and then customers could run their Ghost site on their own server for $5 instead of paying upwards of $20 to Ghost's official hosting.

I also offered a $19 Ghost update service for anyone self-hosting Ghost who didn't want to do server work.

It was a fun time, jumping into people's DigitalOcean accounts and helping with their sites.

Ghost hosting

After a while, and as I got more confident, I decided to start hosting sites on my own servers.

The set-up work was the same—although it got more streamlined over time as I started writing scripts and some small automations—but the benefit was that I could charge an on-going subscription to each customer instead of the $99 flat fee.

I spun up a few servers and started selling Ghost hosting in November 2020.

(I ran both version of Gloat for a while, then closed gloat.dev in 2023)

Gloat was doing well, though never really broke through 100 concurrent customers. It reached a peak of $1.7K MRR, with costs around $400/month.

The end

With Ghost v6, the company announced a more complicated hosting setup with two external services required for analytics and ActivityPub.

I had just had a long break from working on side projects (happily spending my days working at Loops and doing more non-tech things like football coaching in the evenings).

When the announcement came, I struggled to come up with a good way to support Ghost's new infrastructure and with a lack of passion to make it work, decided it would be better to shut down Gloat.

My only requirement for closing Gloat would that all sites would be migrated seamlessly to a new host. I didn't want to give my customers any issues or downtime, or have to migrate to a new host themselves.

My first thought was to email Jannis at MagicPages. I had never spoken to him directly before, but I had seen him launch MagicPages previously and create an impressive platform (much better, in my eyes, than I had with Gloat).

The deal

I pitched Jannis the idea of him taking over Gloat's sites on August 22nd.

Hi Jannis!
Dan from Gloat here.
I'm currently shutting down some of my side projects and am looking to figure out a good solution for Gloat's hosted sites.
Honestly, I'm gutted that v6 requires a lot of changes for hosting, with the two external services it supports, upgraded Node etc. I don't have a ton of time for Gloat so all the change is a bit of a bother personally.
I obviously don't want to just close Gloat and screw over my customers, and I thought maybe talking to you about migrating sites would be a good idea.
Would you be interested in discussing this? I could provide you a bulk set of new customers and in return I'd just ask for a certain amount of months of hosting up front as a kind of "sale".
What do you think?
Super impressed with what you've built by the way!
Cheers,
-Dan

We emailed back and forth discussing what would be required from both of us, how much it would cost and how a migration process would work.

By the 27th of August, we had agreed on most things, and on September 1st, I sent over a first draft of the Purchaser Agreement. We both signed and completed the deal on September 4th.

It was a very simple process, for which I owe Jannis a big thank you.

We structured the deal as an up-front payment of about half the total amount, then the rest as monthly instalments over a year.

Based on a 3x multiple of MRR (a typical way to value SaaS products), the sale price was low (and much lower than an offer I had in 2020), but I wanted to sell and was happy with the final price. It almost matches last year's profit from Gloat, so in some respects I've created a year of income without having to run it.

But the best part is that Jannis will start hosting my customers on his much better infrastructure, and I know the sites are in safe hands.

The migration

I have started giving Jannis access to the accounts that Gloat has been running on, and we will migrate all Gloat sites to MagicPages between now and the middle of October.

It will take some work on both sides, but the end result will be more customers and more revenue for Jannis, and a clean break for me (I have some things planned).

I'm very happy that things ended up like this; Jannis saying yes immediately, how easy he has made everything, my customers going to a better home, etc.

Good luck, Jannis!

And a huge thank you to the 300+ people who chose Gloat for their hosting during the past five years 🙏

You can read Jannis' announcement of the sale here.