I recently decided to migrate my ghost blog from ghost(pro) subscription to a digital ocean droplet. Primary reasons for the migration were:

1. Inability to modify themes with a basic subscription

2. Limited integrations.

Here are the steps involved in the migration:

Downloading content from Ghost(pro) website

Navigate to your Ghost dashboard -> Settings -> Labs
- Export your content
- Download current redirects
- Download current routes.yaml
Navigate to your Ghost dashboard -> Settings -> Design
- Go to Change theme -> Advanced -> Download
Navigate to Members -> Settings -> Export all members
Send an email to support@ghost.org from your registered email asking for a zip of all the images used in your website.

Creating a droplet on Digital Ocean

Create an account and sign in on Digital Ocean
Click here and then select 'Create Ghost Droplet'
Make sure it says "Ghost latest on Ubuntu XX.xx". If it doesn't say that, you may end up creating a droplet without Ghost.
The default droplet configuration works fine for a regular ghost website with a few hundred visitors per day
Add your SSH key
Do not enable Monitoring unless you choose a bigger droplet -> Adding a monitoring agent will make your website frequently unresponsive, as it is resource intensive.
Create the droplet. It will be ready in a minute!

Click on 'Droplets' on the control panel. Now you can see all your droplets.
Go to the settings dropdown menu for your droplet and select 'Add Domain'. Make sure you're setting the domain for the droplet and not for the "Project".
Type the name of your website (clearsignal.xyz in my case) and click on 'Add Domain'
It should create 4 entries as shown below
Navigate to your domain name registrar (Namecheap in my case) and set custom nameservers as mentioned here

Type the following command: ssh root@{public ip of droplet}
Wait till the ghost installation is complete
- Enter the relevant information when prompted
Go to {domainname}/ghost to configure your website.
Navigate to Settings -> Labs -> Delete All content
Click on Import content. Don't forget to click on the 'import' button after selecting the file.
Upload redirects and routes
Go to settings -> design -> upload theme . Make sure to rename the theme before uploading.
Copy images from the zip emailed to you from ghost support to the droplet. Use the following command:
scp -pr {Local path to extracted zip from support@ghost.org}/content/images/ root@{Droplet Public ip} : /var/www/ghost/content/images/*

Now you can modify your ghost theme and upload it anytime. Subscription costs came down from 11$/month to 6$/month Affine Augmentations‌