Since I’m hosting my own version of the Ghost software on Digital Ocean, I am responsible for applying all the server and software updates. The Ghost team make regular releases, every few weeks it seems, and it doesn't take long to fall behind.
Be wary of default settings. They can cause confusing behaviour if you don’t fully understand the consequences, debugging can lead to wild goose chases and the solution is sometimes so trivial that the waste of time hurts.
It's fairly straightforward to set up a blog such as this one. I'll go through the steps I took with some details about the decisions I made along the way.