Michael Soto

I'm a senior content strategist & technical writer working for Elest.io. I turn complex self-hosted solutions into clear, actionable guides. 7 years crafting developer content. Coffee-fueled, deadline-ready, obsessed with finding the right words.

Elestio

Elestio CLI & Agent Skill: Let AI Agents Deploy and Manage Your Infrastructure

Two months ago, we started asking ourselves a simple question: what if your AI coding assistant could deploy infrastructure the same way it writes code? Not through a dashboard. Not by generating Terraform files you have to review and apply. Just... deploy it. Say "I need a PostgreSQL database&

Outline

Outline + Keycloak SSO: Build a Secure Team Wiki with Single Sign-On

I spent two days setting up Outline for my team's documentation. Beautiful wiki, real-time collaboration, Markdown support. Then someone asked: "How do we log in?" That's when I realized Outline doesn't have built-in authentication. No username/password form. Nothing. You need an

self-hosting

The Self-Hosting Market Is Exploding: $85.2B Projected by 2034 (What's Driving the Surge)

Every year, some analyst publishes a report about a "booming market" and everyone nods politely before forgetting about it. But this one caught my attention: the self-hosting market is projected to hit $85.2 billion by 2034, up from $15.6 billion in 2024. That's an

Self-Hosted

Headscale: Run Your Own Tailscale Control Server (Zero Cloud Dependency)

Mesh VPNs changed everything. Instead of routing all traffic through a central server (and paying for that privilege), your devices connect directly to each other. Tailscale made this magic accessible to everyone with a slick UI and zero-config setup. But there's a catch. Your connection metadata still flows

AI

LiteLLM: One API Gateway to Control 100+ LLM Providers (Virtual Keys, Routing, and Guardrails)

Your team is burning through $50k/month in LLM API costs and you have no idea who's responsible. Sound familiar? Every developer has their own API key. Some are testing with GPT-4 when GPT-3.5 would suffice. Others forgot to remove debugging loops that hammer the API. And

Self-Hosted

EU Data Residency Laws Are Breaking Your SaaS Stack (Here's How to Fix It)

If you're running a European business on American SaaS tools, you might have a compliance problem you don't even know about yet. The regulatory landscape shifted dramatically in the past two years. GDPR enforcement got teeth. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework faces ongoing legal challenges. And

AI

Why Vector Databases Are the Missing Piece in Your Self-Hosted AI Stack

You've probably heard the buzz about running your own AI. Maybe you've already got Ollama humming along on a spare machine, serving up Llama or Mistral models. You ask it questions, it gives you answers. Magic. But here's the thing: those local LLMs have

ollama

175,000 Ollama Servers Are Wide Open Right Now (Is Yours One of Them?)

Researchers from SentinelOne and Censys just dropped a report that should make every self-hosted AI enthusiast nervous: 175,108 Ollama instances across 130 countries are sitting on the public internet with zero authentication. No password, no API key, no nothing. Nearly half of them have tool-calling capabilities enabled. Attackers are

stirling-pdf

Stirling PDF: The Open-Source Tool That Finally Lets You Delete Adobe Acrobat

Every business deals with PDFs. Contracts to sign, invoices to merge, reports to compress, scanned documents to make searchable. And for most teams, that means one of two things: paying Adobe $20/month per user, or uploading sensitive files to some random free website you found on Google. Neither option

object-storage

MinIO Is in Maintenance Mode: Your Guide to S3-Compatible Storage Alternatives

If you've been running MinIO in production, you probably felt a chill run down your spine in December 2025. The project quietly entered maintenance mode. No fanfare, no migration guide, just a commit to the README and a locked GitHub issue with 29 thumbs-down reactions. Here's

SigNoz

SigNoz + OpenTelemetry: Build a Complete Observability Stack for Your Microservices

Your microservices are slow. Users are complaining. And somewhere in your distributed system, there's a bottleneck you can't find because you're flying blind. Most teams solve this by throwing money at Datadog or New Relic. Then they get the invoice and start questioning their

ToolJet

Low-Code Showdown: ToolJet vs Appsmith vs Budibase (Which One Fits Your Team?)

Every growing team hits the same wall. Someone needs an internal dashboard. Another team wants a customer onboarding form connected to the database. The sales team is begging for a CRM view that actually makes sense. And your engineering backlog is already six months deep. This is where low-code platforms

AI

AI DevOps: Your AI Assistant That Can Actually Fix Your Servers

You're staring at your server logs at 2 AM. Something's wrong with your Nextcloud instance. CPU spiking, disk space warnings, and you're not entirely sure what changed. Sound familiar? We've been there. That's why we built AI DevOps, an AI

Metabase

How Metabase Lets Your Entire Team Explore Data (No SQL Required)

Every business runs on data, but most businesses can't actually use it. The sales team wants to know which leads convert best. The marketing team wants to see campaign performance. The CEO wants a dashboard that answers "how are we doing?" without waiting three days for

Mautic

How Mautic Gives Small Businesses Enterprise Marketing Tools (Without the Enterprise Price Tag)

If you're running a small business and paying Mailchimp $60/month for 2,500 contacts, you've probably done the math and winced. And if you've looked at HubSpot's Marketing Hub at $890/month for "Professional" features, you might have laughed

Security

Open-Source Cybersecurity Tools Every Self-Hoster Should Know in 2026

Running self-hosted services is one of the smartest moves a business or homelab enthusiast can make. But here's the uncomfortable truth most self-hosting guides skip over: every service you spin up is another attack surface. And if you're not actively protecting your infrastructure, you're

Neo4j

Why Graph Databases Are the Secret Weapon Behind Fraud Detection, Recommendations, and AI

Your business runs on relationships. Customers connect to products. Products connect to suppliers. Employees connect to departments. Transactions connect buyers and sellers. Every meaningful decision you make depends on understanding how things relate to each other. And yet, most companies store all of this in spreadsheets and relational databases that

self-hosting

Digital Sovereignty in 2026: How EU Data Residency Laws Are Driving the Self-Hosting Boom

Something interesting is happening in European boardrooms right now. CTOs who spent the last decade moving everything to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are having uncomfortable conversations with their legal teams. The topic? Where their data actually lives. The Regulatory Tipping Point The EU's regulatory framework around data

Baserow

Why Small Businesses Are Ditching Airtable for Baserow

Your team is growing. Spreadsheets are everywhere. Someone just overwrote last week's client list, and nobody knows which version is correct anymore. Sound familiar? This is the exact moment most small businesses discover Airtable. It promises the flexibility of spreadsheets with the power of databases. And it delivers.

AI

MoltBot Just Broke the Internet: Deploy Your Own AI Assistant in Minutes

You've probably seen it everywhere this week. Your Twitter feed. Hacker News. That one Slack channel where the senior dev posts "interesting stuff." MoltBot just gained 9,000 GitHub stars in a single day, and Andrej Karpathy himself gave it a public endorsement. People are calling

Zammad

Why Businesses Are Switching from Zendesk to Zammad (And Saving Thousands)

If you've ever watched your Zendesk bill climb higher each time you add a new support agent, you're not alone. Customer service software has become one of the most expensive line items for growing businesses, and many teams are starting to question whether they're

AI

Build AI Chatbots with Dify (No Coding Required)

Every small business owner knows the frustration: customers expect instant responses, but hiring a 24/7 support team is expensive. Meanwhile, ChatGPT and similar AI tools seem promising, but they don't know anything about your products, your policies, or your specific business context. This is exactly what Dify

Mastodon

The Fediverse Is Growing: Why Decentralized Social Media Matters in 2026

Something interesting happened in 2024. When Twitter became X and started charging for features that used to be free, millions of users didn't just complain. They left. But they didn't all go to the same place. Some went to Bluesky. Others joined Threads. But a growing

Paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx + S3: Build a Searchable Document Archive with OCR and Automated Tagging

Every organization has a document problem. Invoices pile up. Contracts get lost in email threads. That receipt you need for the tax audit? Somewhere in a folder called "Misc 2024." Paperless-ngx solves this by turning your documents into a searchable, tagged archive with full-text OCR. Add S3 storage

Langflow

Langflow + Ollama: Build Production-Ready AI Agents Without Writing Python

If you've tried building AI agents with Python, you know the drill: installing dependencies, debugging async functions, wrestling with LangChain's abstractions. It works, but it's slow. And if you're not a Python developer, it's a wall. Langflow changes that. It&