I have had a Webfaction account for a long time. I keep random projects on it. In most things I have moved on to other services, but it’s still useful once in a while given that for the low price I can keep a lot of crap on it.

Recently, I wanted to install Ghost as a headless CMS on another project. I had a thought that it might be easy to set up on my shared hosting than to try to set it up on my own dedicated server. Indeed, it was.

Log in to Webfaction dashboard

For most users, you can login to my.webfaction.com.

Add the Ghost and Node applications

• From the dashboard, click Domains/Websites then Applications
• Add two applications: Ghost, and Node.

Set up website

• Navigate to Websites.
• Add a website. Name it whatever you want
• Add the domains you want to use (make sure you point your domain to your Webfaction server’s IP address)
• Click reuse applications, be sure to select the Node and Ghost apps you just created
• Select the https settings you prefer (I use LetsEncrypt and highly recommend it, though Webfaction’s shared certificate works just fine)
• It will prompt you for a path for Ghost. I selected mydomain.tld/ghost
• Click save
• Give it a few seconds, and browse to mydomain.tld/ghost (with https if you selected that)

Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation and log in!