Dan Rowden's Gloat: Managing Servers for Writers
The case of Dan Rowden, who turned a Ghost installation service into a managed hosting subscription. We look at how he built recurring revenue with a small customer base and, as the operational burden grew, handed over customers and the service to another independent operator.
Dan Rowden is a web developer and designer from the UK who has built small internet services for independent publishers. He ran Magpile, a magazine-related service, and Subsail, a subscription management tool, and later expanded into products for writers and publishers using Ghost. Gloat is the Ghost installation and hosting business he started in this process.
Ghost is open-source software for publishing blogs and newsletters and managing paying subscribers. Gloat was not a replacement for Ghost, but a service that installed it and managed servers on customers' behalf. The reason customers paid was not the writing functionality itself, but the convenience of being able to run a publication on their own domain without dealing with servers.
The service that sold one installation at a time became a subscription business
The first product, launched in June 2020, was an installation service that set up Ghost on the customer's DigitalOcean server. The installation fee was initially $59 and later rose to $99, and customers separately used a server costing around $5 per month. He started by selling an installation task he knew well, rather than building new software.
Even if he handled the installation, there was still work customers had to prepare. Customers had to sign up for DigitalOcean and the email delivery service Mailgun, and also give Dan domain management access. For non-developers, this preparation process itself was a burden, and Dan also had to check accounts and access permissions for each customer.
So in November 2020, he added managed hosting that ran customer sites on his own servers. The launch price was $149 per year, and he emphasized that it did not limit page views or subscriber numbers. Site installation was still manual, but the customer preparation process was greatly reduced, and for the business owner it created recurring revenue instead of one-time installation fees.
Early growth was gradual. About six weeks after the hosting launch, in December 2020, monthly recurring revenue passed $100, and in January 2021 he disclosed $227. The cumulative revenue of more than $6,000 announced at the same time also included installation service revenue, so it should not be read as hosting subscription revenue or monthly revenue.
Low prices and limited operational scope
The Gloat website, where a sale notice remains, shows pricing of $189 per year or $19 per month. The offering included unlimited page views and subscribers, and 20,000 newsletter emails per month. Therefore, 'unlimited' did not mean providing all resources without limits, but rather not raising prices based on certain metrics. Currently, Gloat is not accepting new signups and directs people to Magic Pages.
The managed service included daily backups and weekly software updates. On the other hand, it did not include a CDN by default, which delivers content quickly across multiple regions, and it advised customers who needed one to set it up separately. The setup provided the features needed for small blogs and newsletters at a fixed price, rather than being hosting with every add-on feature.
He also gradually refined how he explained the product. It initially launched as a simple one-page website, but in July 2020 he expanded the descriptions for each service and created a comparison page with the official hosting Ghost(Pro). Rather than getting customers to understand a completely new tool, the approach was to help them choose how to run Ghost, which they were already interested in.
There were also other products around Gloat targeting the same customer base. Dan ran Cove, a Ghost commenting tool, theme sales, consulting, and custom development alongside it. This arrangement had room to connect ancillary work needed by hosting customers to other products, but the revenue of each product must not be combined as Gloat's standalone performance.
In a 2022 interview, he explained that he ran multiple products alone, and that for most of them there was not much that absolutely had to be done each week beyond responding to customer emails. Ghost hosting was the exception, however, requiring customer sites to be updated when a new version came out. Even though it could normally be maintained with little intervention, it was not a business in which the responsibility to respond to changes in the underlying software disappeared.
The highest monthly recurring revenue (MRR) disclosed in a 2025 sale retrospective was about $1,700, and monthly costs were about $400. The simple difference between the two figures is $1,300, but this cannot be conclusively treated as net profit that reflects labor costs and taxes as well. The $1,700 was also presented not as revenue at the time of sale but as the business's peak.
Concurrent customers never exceeded 100, but over five years cumulative users who chose Gloat numbered more than 300. Cumulative users and subscribers at a given point are different metrics, and it is significant that this business was sustained with a customer base in the tens.
Operating Workload Became More Important Than Revenue
2025 was not the first time he considered the possibility of a sale. In 2020, he was also offered $75,000 on terms that would transfer Gloat's setup service and hosting, Cove, and the Substation theme together. However, the deal at the time fell through when the prospective buyer decided not to proceed, and this amount is neither the value of Gloat alone nor the actual sale proceeds in 2025.
The trigger that changed the direction of operations was Ghost 6.0, which appeared in August 2025. The new version expanded web analytics and social web integration features, and supporting it required considering additional services and settings beyond the existing installation method. However, this did not mean Ghost itself could no longer be run in the existing way, so the problem was not the impossibility of hosting but the increased operational complexity of providing the new features as well.
Dan was working at Loops at the time and was distancing himself from personal projects. Judging that he lacked the time and motivation to support the new infrastructure, he decided to wind down the business rather than continue expanding it. Even if it generated revenue, whether it was worth bearing the time that would need to be invested going forward was a separate judgment.
Selling the Business by Migrating Customers
On August 22, 2025, Dan proposed a plan to transfer the customer sites to Magic Pages. The counterpart was Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, another independent Ghost hosting operator, and the two signed an agreement on September 4 and completed the deal. It was not an acquisition selling technology to a large company, but a deal transferring customers and operations to a small operator doing the same work.
The exact sale proceeds were not disclosed. The structure was to receive about half of the payment upfront and the remainder in monthly installments over one year, and he explained that the total amount was almost the same as Gloat's previous year's profit. He saw it as a choice that secured about one year's income without directly operating the business.
Customer migration was a core condition of the deal. In the acquisition announcement, the plan was for the two operators to move the sites from September 2025 to mid-October, and for customers to change only their domain's DNS settings according to the guidance. The policy was to migrate to Magic Pages infrastructure that supports Ghost 6.0's new features while avoiding site downtime and disruption to publishing work.
In this deal, the important asset can be seen as not proprietary blogging technology but the relationships with customers already paying and the operational foundation capable of taking them over. For the acquirer, who had been focused on the same hosting work, it was an opportunity to grow customers, and for Dan, it was a choice to keep serving customers while laying down operational responsibility. Gloat is a case that shows not only creating small recurring income but also how to conclude the business by handing it over to another operator.