Yokai was my Ghost hosting service at yok.ai. It’s now retired. View the original screenshot.
An idea that got me out of bed
Ghost had just launched on Node.js, and I was using it for my blog. My Anatomy of an Auto-Buying Script article was one of the things I published with it.
Late one night, I was lying in bed thinking that a hosting platform for Ghost would be pretty cool. Then it clicked: “WAIT I CAN BUILD THIS.” I could picture how the pieces would fit together, and suddenly I wanted to start immediately.
So I got out of bed at 2 a.m. and started coding.
From a signup to a running blog
I built a responsive website where someone could register for hosting, and a Node.js service to provision an instance running Ghost for each registrant. That connected the signup to a running blog that I hosted for them.
As I remember it, the hosting ran on one server, with port management keeping the individual instances organized. The project brought the website and the server work together: registration on the front, provisioning and hosting behind it.
A dollar a month
I integrated Google’s payment platform at the time to handle subscriptions. The entry plan was $1 a month. The surviving screenshot shows all four plans: Sprite at $1, Specter at $3, Wraith at $7, and Phantom at $10 per month, alongside the signup and checkout form.
That was Yokai: a small idea about hosting a new blogging platform, followed by the registrations, running instances, and payments needed to make it a service. It began with realizing, in the middle of the night, that I could make the thing I was imagining.