I don't think Ghost is providing any new solutions here—they've just gotten lucky / been small enough to not be out-competed in their hosting niche yet.
While I agree with most of your comment, I do want to point out that intentionally targeting to be small/niche is a kinda solution in itself. To me SourceHut is another good example of how being small can be winning move. Being sustainable with <50 employees is far more manageable even if you face some competition, than if you have >1000 employees.
Fair! In this case though I meant small in terms of adoption—it looks like there are some alternative Ghost hosting providers, but none of them really have name-brand recognition in the same way Ghost does, and even Ghost is one small player in the "non-Wordpress subscription blog / mailing list" space. But a lot of my comment comes from watching the Redis / AWS Valkey split as well—even if Redis stayed as a smaller team instead of trying to compete with the hyperscalers, they'd still be stuck in the same catch-22—watching their revenue dwindle to zero while AWS and GCP competed on proprietary platform features.
Would they? There are people who would never pay for AWS/GCP; and there are also people who are willing to pay higher prices for better support and very latest features.
Had Redis stayed small, they would have a smaller slice of income.. but it is entirely possible that even that smaller slice of income would be more than enough to sustain the company.
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While I agree with most of your comment, I do want to point out that intentionally targeting to be small/niche is a kinda solution in itself. To me SourceHut is another good example of how being small can be winning move. Being sustainable with <50 employees is far more manageable even if you face some competition, than if you have >1000 employees.
Fair! In this case though I meant small in terms of adoption—it looks like there are some alternative Ghost hosting providers, but none of them really have name-brand recognition in the same way Ghost does, and even Ghost is one small player in the "non-Wordpress subscription blog / mailing list" space. But a lot of my comment comes from watching the Redis / AWS Valkey split as well—even if Redis stayed as a smaller team instead of trying to compete with the hyperscalers, they'd still be stuck in the same catch-22—watching their revenue dwindle to zero while AWS and GCP competed on proprietary platform features.
Would they? There are people who would never pay for AWS/GCP; and there are also people who are willing to pay higher prices for better support and very latest features.
Had Redis stayed small, they would have a smaller slice of income.. but it is entirely possible that even that smaller slice of income would be more than enough to sustain the company.