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.

Paperless-ngx

Inside Paperless-ngx: How OCR + Tagging Actually Works When You Drop a PDF

You drop a PDF into a folder. Twenty seconds later it shows up in the UI with text you can search, tags that match the content, and a filename that looks like a human typed it. Most users never look at what happens in those twenty seconds. Today we do.

Integration

Lovable + Elestio: Use Managed Postgres in Your AI-Built App

Lovable is one of the fastest ways to go from "idea" to "deployed app" without writing the boilerplate. The catch: its bundled Supabase free tier caps you at 500 MB of storage on a shared CPU. The moment your AI-built app starts taking real users, you

AI

LibreChat vs OpenWebUI vs Lobe Chat: Which to Self-Host in 2026?

You've decided you don't want your team's prompts (or your customers' chat history) sitting on someone else's GPU. Good call. Now comes the part nobody warns you about: picking a self-hosted ChatGPT clone is harder than picking the model behind it.

MCP

How to Deploy Servers on Elestio with Claude (New MCP Connector)

There's a moment when you're running self-hosted infrastructure where you realize you spend more time tabbing between the chat with your AI and the dashboard of your provider than actually building. You ask Claude how to set up WordPress in Frankfurt, it gives you a plan,

Comparison

Apache Superset vs Metabase vs Redash: Which Open-Source BI Tool to Self-Host in 2026?

If you're picking an open-source BI tool in 2026, the shortlist is short: Apache Superset, Metabase, and Redash. Same SQL backend, same CSV upload, same "make a chart, share a dashboard" promise. The differences live in who owns the project, who the tool is actually built

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 8 Notable Releases This Week (April 26 - May 3, 2026)

A busy week across the catalog. Forgejo shipped patches across three release lines, Portainer landed a major STS with GitOps for Helm, Ollama wired Claude Desktop into its launch flow, and Nextcloud previewed version 34 alongside two stable maintenance drops. Eight notable updates below, with a security note up top.

Agent-Native

What Agent Native Infrastructure Actually Looks Like

A developer types eight words into Claude Code: "deploy a supabase server in Netcup EU please." Eight minutes later, a 13-container Supabase stack is running on bare metal in Nuremberg, Germany. Studio URL, credentials, public IP, monthly cost: returned. No YAML. No Terraform. No dashboard click. Then the

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 18, 2026. Mistral 3.5 Lands, Hashimoto Quits GitHub, cPanel CVSS 10

If you ran a self-hosted stack this week, you probably felt the ground move. Mistral dropped a 128B model that fits on four GPUs, Mitchell Hashimoto walked Ghostty off GitHub, and a cPanel zero-day got everyone scrambling before the weekend. Plus a new self-hosting box, a Home Assistant beta, Proxmox

Comparisons

Dify vs Langflow vs Flowise: Which Open-Source LLM App Builder Actually Ships to Production?

Every comparison of Dify, Langflow, and Flowise asks the same question: which one is easiest to start with? The drag-and-drop demos all look identical, the marketing pages all promise "from prototype to production," and the YouTube reviews all stop at the second flow you build. The harder question,

Comparisons

ClickHouse vs DuckDB: Which Analytical Database for Embedded vs Distributed Workloads in 2026?

Every "ClickHouse vs DuckDB" article on the internet treats them as competitors. Two columnar analytical databases. Pick one. Move on. That framing is wrong, and it costs teams real time. ClickHouse and DuckDB are solving different problems. Most data teams that adopt one eventually adopt the other, and

Comparisons

pgvector vs Qdrant vs Weaviate: Which Vector Database Holds Up at 100M Vectors?

Most "vector database benchmark" articles top out at 1 million vectors and call it a day. That's fine for a side project. It's not what production RAG looks like. A real production index for an enterprise documentation corpus, a content recommendation system, or a

SMB

How Zammad Can Replace Zendesk for Customer Support Teams

If you run a small support team, Zendesk's pricing has probably crossed your desk recently. The Suite Professional plan starts at $115 per agent per month. For a team of five, that's $6,900 a year for what's mostly a glorified shared inbox with

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 6 Notable Releases This Week (April 19-26, 2026)

Another week, another wave of open-source releases. The headline this week is a security patch from Keycloak fixing ten CVEs in a single drop. Beyond that: Ollama wires up a new agent integration, Gitea ships back-to-back patch releases, and Discourse rolls out its April monthly. Here's what landed.

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 17, 2026. K8s Scale-to-Zero Lands, Cal.com Goes Closed, and a CVSS 10 Hits AVideo

Another loaded week in the self-hosted world. Kubernetes finally turned on the feature people have been asking about for seven years, Cal.com made a decision that lit up every tech forum, and a CVSS 10.0 dropped on a video platform you might actually be running. Let's

DevOps

How to Scale n8n with Redis Queue Mode for Parallel Workflow Execution

You know the moment. Your n8n instance is humming along, running 20 workflows, and then someone wires up a webhook that suddenly receives a few hundred events per minute. Everything starts backing up. Executions that used to finish in seconds now take minutes. A sync job blocks an API call,

Docker

5 Docker Compose Mistakes That Will Bite You in Production

You've got your docker-compose.yml working on your laptop. Containers come up, the app responds, everything looks fine. But "works on my machine" and "survives in production" are two very different things. Here are five Docker Compose mistakes that quietly set you up for

CI/CD

What's New in Elestio CI/CD: Zero-Downtime Deploys, Health Checks, and More

We've been working on making Elestio's CI/CD pipeline smoother, faster, and more reliable. Whether you're running a single service or managing multiple pipelines across projects, these updates make every deployment safer and more predictable. Here's what's new and what

Uptime Kuma

How to Set Up Uptime Monitoring with Uptime Kuma on Elestio

You've got services running. A database here, an API there, maybe a marketing site on a separate box. Everything works great until it doesn't, and by the time you notice, your users have already noticed first. Uptime Kuma fixes this. It's a self-hosted monitoring

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 7 Notable Releases This Week (April 12-18, 2026)

This week brought a significant Keycloak release with zero-downtime updates going GA, Forgejo hitting its 100th release with LTS designation, and Jellyfin patching critical security issues. Here's everything that shipped across Elestio's catalog from April 12-18, 2026. Security Alerts Jellyfin 10.11.8 addresses security vulnerabilities

Chatwoot

How Chatwoot Can Replace Intercom for Your Support Team

If you've ever opened an Intercom invoice and felt your stomach drop, you're not alone. What starts as $29/seat/month quickly balloons once you add AI resolutions ($0.99 each), extra lite seats, and usage-based charges for SMS and phone. A 5-person team handling 1,

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 16, 2026. Mozilla Drops an AI Client, K8s 1.36 Preview, and Valkey Takes Over

You know that feeling when every tab in your browser has breaking news? That was this week for the self-hosted world. Mozilla dropped an AI client nobody saw coming, Kubernetes 1.36 is about to land with some genuinely useful changes, and the Valkey takeover is now officially complete across

Open Source

Euro-Office vs OnlyOffice: The Fork That's Splitting the Self-Hosted Office World

On March 27, 2026, a coalition of nine European companies walked into the Bundestag in Berlin and announced they were forking OnlyOffice. The project is called Euro-Office, and it's already the most controversial thing to happen in the self-hosted office world since LibreOffice split from OpenOffice. If you&

Comparison

Immich vs PhotoPrism: Which Self-Hosted Photo Manager for Your Family?

Google Photos gives you 15 GB for free, then starts charging. iCloud locks you into Apple's ecosystem. Amazon Photos requires a Prime subscription. At some point, you start wondering: can I just host my own? Yes. And the two best options are Immich and PhotoPrism. Both are open-source,

Comparison

Collabora Online vs OnlyOffice: Which Self-Hosted Office Suite After the Euro-Office Fork?

The self-hosted office suite space just got very interesting. A European consortium — Nextcloud, IONOS, and Proton among them — forked OnlyOffice into "Euro-Office," citing transparency concerns, closed development practices, and the project's Russian development team. OnlyOffice responded by suspending its 8-year partnership with Nextcloud and alleging license

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: Linux 7.0 Lands, WordPress 7.0 Delayed, and 3 Critical CVEs (April 5-12, 2026)

This was the week Linux jumped to version 7.0, WordPress 7.0 got delayed, and Jellyfin shipped a follow-up patch to fix regressions from last week's security release. A quieter week on the release front, but with some landmark moments. Here's what dropped. Security Alerts