Three years ago, Magic Pages started as a side project. A handful of Ghost sites on a single server. Today, it's over 1,200 publications and counting.
But 2026 feels different. Not because of the numbers – those are just a consequence. It feels different because Magic Pages is about to change in ways that go beyond "more sites" or "new features".
This year, for the first time, I won't be doing this alone.
I want to quickly walk you through what's coming.
A New Team Member
Since launching Magic Pages, I've handled everything: infrastructure, support, development, marketing, billing, and the occasional 2 AM server alert. It worked. But it also meant that every time I wanted to build something new, I had to balance it against responding to support requests.
In February, I will onboard my first team member. A brilliant and curious guy who's excited to dive deep into Ghost, Magic Pages, and everything surrounding it.
This is a big deal for me. Not because I'm tired of support – quite the opposite, I genuinely enjoy helping all of you every day. But because having someone else on the team means there's less pressure on me. There's somebody else who will get to know the business inside out. And together we'll split our time to work on new features, better documentation, and the awesome support you've all learned to love.
Magic Pages has always been personal. That won't change. But now it gets to be personal and sustainable.
One Plan to Rule Them All
When I launched Magic Pages, I offered a single plan. It wasn't the cheapest on the market, but also not the most expensive. Over time, people approached me and asked for a more affordable option – that's how the Starter plan was born.
The idea was to have an affordable entry point. Simple blogs don't need all the extras, right?
Here's what I learned: they kind of do.
A very common support question I get is some variation of "why is my Ghost site slow?" And the answer is almost never about infrastructure on Magic Pages's end or Ghost doing something weird. It's physics. If your reader is in Australia and your server is in Germany, a few megabytes of images might have to travel across the world. That takes time. A content delivery network (CDN) fixes this – but the Starter plan didn't include the full CDN setup, because the price couldn't justify the costs involved.
Then there's the custom themes restriction. On paper, it made sense as a way to differentiate plans. In practice, it's just confusing. Someone comes from WordPress, where themes are a given, and I have to explain why their $6/month plan doesn't let them upload a theme they just bought. It's a weird limitation that's hard to justify.
So, I'm simplifying.
If you're currently on the Starter plan: nothing changes for you. You keep your plan and its pricing. You'll have the option to upgrade, of course, but there's no pressure.
From March 2026 onwards, the Starter plan simply won't be available for new customers anymore.
Instead, Magic Pages will have one plan. The one that I think actually makes sense. Not from a business perspective to maximize profit – but from the reality I see from hosting over a thousand Ghost sites.
Can you run a Ghost site without a CDN? Can you do without custom themes? Absolutely. But the experience doesn't reflect the quality I want to provide at Magic Pages.
So, no more arbitrary restrictions. Everyone gets the full Ghost experience: any theme you want, full API access, ActivityPub integration, native analytics, enterprise-grade CDN, everything.
The pricing: $15/month, $150/year, or $450 for lifetime.
You'll never have to wonder "do I need to upgrade for this?" again.
Better Security, Faster Sites
Magic Pages is moving from Bunny.net to Cloudflare for CDN and security.
What this means for you: faster load times globally (my tests showed 40-50% improvement) and enterprise-grade protection against bots, spam, and attacks. Cloudflare's network is one of the largest in the world – your site gets served from wherever your readers are.
The move also finally lets me tackle a persistent issue: spam attacks that abuse Ghost's magic link authentication. These have been a headache for months. Cloudflare's firewall can block them intelligently, before they ever hit your site.
If you're curious, I have explored this a bit more on my personal blog:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
A note on Cloudflare being a US company: I know some of you chose Magic Pages specifically for the EU infrastructure angle. I want to be upfront: Cloudflare is headquartered in the US.
But here's the thing – a CDN works differently than hosting. Your data, your database, your content, your member lists – all of that stays exactly where it is: on Hetzner servers in Germany. What Cloudflare handles is traffic routing and caching.
I've spent time looking into Cloudflare's actual privacy track record, their transparency reports, and how they've handled legal pressure in the past. I'll write a separate, more detailed post on this for those who want to dig deeper. But the short version: I'm confident this is the right move – both for security and for the long-term sustainability of Magic Pages.
Controlling AI Crawlers
Here's a bonus that comes with the Cloudflare move: you'll finally be able to control AI crawlers.
This has been one of the most requested features – and also one of the most polarising. Some of you want to block every AI bot from touching your content. Others want to explicitly allow them, hoping for better visibility in AI-generated answers.
With Cloudflare's firewall, I can give you the choice. Block them, allow them, or do nothing – it's up to you. I'll add a simple toggle in the customer portal.
Customer Portal: A Split Personality
The customer portal inside Ghost Admin has been great for quick actions: checking your plan, managing your domain, tweaking configurations. But as Magic Pages grew, I noticed something.
About 20% of customers have multiple sites on Magic Pages. One customer has a total of 65.
For those users, the integrated portal becomes clunky. Managing billing across multiple sites, handling complex configurations, keeping track of everything – it doesn't fit neatly into a small frame loaded into an admin panel.
So, I'm splitting the portal.
The integrated portal inside Ghost Admin will stay. It'll handle all the quick stuff: site settings, domain management, support access. Fast and focused.
But there will also be a new external customer portal. This is where billing lives, where you manage multiple sites in one view, and where more complex features will land. Think of it as your Magic Pages dashboard, separate from any individual Ghost site.
If you only have one site, you'll barely notice the change. If you're juggling multiple publications, this will make your life significantly easier.
Search Gets Smarter
Magic Pages includes Typesense-powered search out of the box. It's fast, it's relevant, and it's been one of the features customers love most.
In 2026, it's getting better.
Right now, search only finds posts and pages. But what if you want to find all posts by a specific author? Or everything tagged with a particular topic? The current search can't do that.
The updates I'm working on will add support for searching tags and authors directly.
I'm also adding something for members-only content: teaser search results. If you have paid or restricted content, non-members will be able to see that it exists and get a preview – without accessing the full article. It's a balance between discoverability and protecting your premium content.
Infrastructure Migration
For those of you following the infrastructure saga on my personal blog – yes, the Kubernetes-to-Docker-Swarm migration is happening. And yes, I'm almost done.
The short version: Kubernetes was the right choice two years ago. It let Magic Pages scale from 100 to 1,100 sites. But it also came with complexity that consumed way too much of my time. Storage issues. Memory-hungry components. Constant firefighting.
Docker Swarm is simpler. It's faster. And frankly, for what Magic Pages needs, it's better.
The migration has been running in parallel for a few weeks. Most of the heavy lifting is done. By the time you read this, you're probably already running on the new infrastructure without knowing it.
What This All Means
If I had to summarise 2026 in one sentence: Magic Pages is growing up.
Not in a "we're a big company now" way. More like... the foundations are getting solid enough that I can actually build on them without worrying they'll crack.
A team member who can share the load. One plan that gives everyone the full experience. Infrastructure that doesn't wake me up at night. A CDN that actually protects you. A portal that scales with your needs.
None of this is revolutionary. But together, it means Magic Pages can be what I always wanted it to be: the Ghost hosting you don't have to think about.
So, these are the goals for 2026. Let's see how it goes.
Jannis
About Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
I'm the founder of Magic Pages, providing managed Ghost hosting that makes it easy to focus on your content instead of technical details.
