I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does.

Which sounds great in theory but then you get to find where your prod DB and testing DB differ and you have to keep chasing that. Unless you are using something like SQLite which has both (disk and in-memory) as an option.

I worked at a place that used a different in-memory DB (H2, IIRC) in place of our MySQL DB for testing. It ended up being hell to maintain and had to have hacks for how H2 and MySQL differ (tests would work in H2 but fail if run against MySQL or vice versa).

Yeah, I’ve been paying $5 (or is it $10?) a month for my Ghost blog on a digital ocean droplet. It’s not worth it, my plan is to move to a static site generator (probably CloudFront -> S3 deployed via GitHub actions in a private repo) at some point. The features of Ghost don’t really matter to me and I hate maintaining the install/updating. Ghost feels like it’s moved more into “self-hosted substack”-territory which I have zero interest in, my blog posts are all public. Also, you can’t hack static files so security isn’t a worry with SSG which is super nice.

Not sure which SSG I’ll go with, when I was younger I would have written my own but now I’ll just pick something off the shelf that has nice themes lol.