I got bored of having to do backups and upgrade versions etc. Also the fact that you can self host at no cost from them made me want to pay them, I like supporting companies and ideas like this.
The benefit to switching was really less maintenance and I could concentrate on writing and to invest in the future of Ghost, win/win!
My traffic is pretty low, no hits on HN yet! :) Quick glance at Google Analytics seems I hit about 1.5-2k visitors a month.
Thanks so much for being a customer! :) And for those who have asked similar things about the Pro service, and why it's expensive compared to a VPS, ^ this is one of the most common reasons we get. Lots of developers start out self-hosting and then decide they'd actually rather be coding other things than maintaining their blog.
The other main difference is that Ghost(Pro) is a managed service. CDN, WAF, Backups, Security, downtime recovery, threat management, etc - are all included. TLDR you sleep easy at night while we stay awake.
Of course, these things will be of different value to everyone - depending on your situation. We actively encourage people to self-host when that's the best setup for them (which is often!) but for many, having a reliable PaaS is the best of both worlds.
It's also a great way of funding the future development of the open source software that you're using, of course. But that's a whole other thing :)
Have you considered increasing the number of views on each plan? Charging for everything else is certainly reasonable, but as I mentioned before, a single popular post can easily exceed the base plan and force you onto the Team plan at $80/mo.
As a followup: what were you paying on Digital Ocean?
(I know it seems like a small deal to talk about $5 or $25 for your main blog with over 1000 monthly visitors, but a lot of people experiment with dozens of little content ideas.)
Was there a benefit to switching?
I should also ask: how much traffic were you getting?