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.

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&

Authentik

Authentik vs Authelia vs Keycloak: Choosing the Right Self-Hosted Identity Provider in 2026

If you're self-hosting applications in 2026, you've probably hit the authentication wall. Every app wants its own login. Your users are drowning in passwords. And you're one data breach away from a very bad week. The solution is an identity provider: a central system

Headless CMS

The Headless CMS Revolution: Why Enterprises Are Taking Back Control of Their Content

Enterprise content teams are having an uncomfortable realization: they don't actually own their content. Sure, they pay for it. They create it. They publish it. But when that content lives on a SaaS platform's servers, subject to their terms of service and pricing whims, "ownership&

Self-Hosting

Self-Hosting in 2026: Why the $85B Market Boom Changes Everything

Something interesting happened to the self-hosting market in 2026. It stopped being a niche hobby and became a legitimate business strategy. The numbers tell the story: the self-hosting market is projected to reach $85.2 billion by 2034, up from $15.6 billion in 2024. That's a compound

Guacamole

Guacamole + LDAP: Set Up Secure Remote Access for Your Entire Team

Remote access is one of those problems that sounds simple until you're managing 50 employees who all need to connect to different machines. TeamViewer wants $50/user/month. AnyDesk's pricing is a mystery. And your security team keeps asking about audit logs. Apache Guacamole solves this

Airflow

Why Your Business Needs Workflow Automation (And How Airflow Replaces Expensive Tools)

Your team probably runs dozens of repetitive tasks every week. Someone exports a report from one system, reformats it, and uploads it to another. Someone else checks if yesterday's data sync completed, then sends a Slack message to confirm. Another person manually triggers the same sequence of API

Databases

pgvector vs ChromaDB: When to Extend PostgreSQL and When to Go Dedicated

Every developer building AI applications faces this question: should I add vector search to my existing PostgreSQL database, or spin up a dedicated vector database like ChromaDB? The answer depends on what you're building. Let me break it down. What's the Actual Difference? pgvector is a

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ + Node.js: Build Resilient Event-Driven Microservices with Dead Letter Queues

Message processing fails. It happens. A downstream API times out, a database connection drops, or your code hits an edge case nobody anticipated. The question is: what happens to that message? Without proper error handling, failed messages either disappear forever or block your entire queue. Dead Letter Queues solve this

Discourse

Discourse + SSO: Implement Single Sign-On with OAuth2 and OIDC

Managing separate logins for your community forum is a headache nobody asked for. Your users already have accounts in your main app, your CRM, or your identity provider. Making them create yet another password for Discourse is friction you can eliminate. Discourse ships with solid SSO support out of the

Taiga

Why Your Team Should Ditch Jira for Taiga

Your project management tool shouldn't cost more than some of your team members. But if you're running Jira for a growing team, you've probably noticed the bills climbing faster than your sprint velocity. Here's the uncomfortable math: Jira Standard runs $7.91/

Zulip

Why Remote Teams Are Switching from Slack to Zulip (Threading Changes Everything)

If you've ever come back from a meeting to find 200 unread Slack messages across 15 channels, you know the feeling. That sinking realization that somewhere in that wall of notifications is something important, but finding it means scrolling through memes, random questions, and half-finished conversations that went

Apache Superset

Apache Superset + PostgreSQL: Build Executive Dashboards Your Team Will Actually Use

Your company has data. Probably a lot of it. And somewhere, someone is asking for "a dashboard" to make sense of it all. The problem? Tableau costs $70/user/month, and you have a perfectly good PostgreSQL database sitting there, full of insights nobody can access without writing

Self-Hosted

The 2026 Homelab Stack: What Self-Hosters Are Actually Running This Year

Spend five minutes on r/selfhosted or any homelab forum and you'll notice something interesting: the conversations have changed. Two years ago, everyone was asking "what should I run?" Now they're sharing sophisticated stacks that rival small business infrastructure. The self-hosting movement has matured.

Meilisearch

Meilisearch + Your Stack: Build Instant Search for React, Vue, or Any Frontend in Under 30 Minutes

You've probably been there. Your app's search is powered by SQL LIKE queries, and users are typing "javascrpt" expecting to find JavaScript tutorials. The result? Nothing. Zero matches. And they bounce. Meilisearch fixes this in a way that feels almost magical. It's

Appwrite

The Rise of Open-Source Backend Platforms: Firebase, Supabase, and Appwrite Compared

Something interesting happened in backend development over the past two years. Firebase, once the default choice for startups building their first app, started losing ground to open-source alternatives. Not because Firebase stopped working, but because developers realized they were trading convenience for control. The shift tells a bigger story about

Comparison

Elestio vs Railway vs Render vs Fly.io: Which Platform Actually Fits Your Needs?

If you're looking to deploy applications in 2025, you've probably stumbled across Railway, Render, and Fly.io. They're everywhere in developer discussions, and for good reason. They promise easy deployments, git-push workflows, and that sweet "it just works" experience. But here'