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.

Kimai

Kimai vs Toggl: Self-Hosted Time Tracking for Small Teams

Toggl Track is everywhere because the UX is genuinely good. Open the app, hit a button, time tracked. But once your team grows past five people, the price stops being a rounding error. Nine euros per user per month for the cheapest paid plan, and the bill grows linearly with

Self-Hosting

Discourse vs Flarum vs NodeBB: Which Self-Hosted Forum Platform in 2026?

Picking a forum platform in 2026 is annoying. Reddit is a private club. Discord is for vibes, not searchable threads. And every SaaS "community platform" either disappears at acquisition or jacks the price the day you depend on it. If you want to own your community, self-hosting is

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 21 Notable Releases This Week (May 24-31, 2026)

Quieter week than last one for splashy releases, but a critical Ghost CMS CVE means a lot of self-hosters need to drop everything and patch. We also got Prometheus 3.12, Uptime Kuma 2.4, a Directus 12 release candidate, fresh stable lines from Authentik, N8N, and Mattermost, and routine

Documenso

Documenso + Keycloak: Add Single Sign-On to Your Self-Hosted E-Signing

Documenso is great until your team grows past five people. Suddenly you are creating accounts one by one, resetting passwords, and praying that nobody puts a customer NDA behind a personal Gmail. Plug Documenso into Keycloak and that whole problem disappears. New hires get access on day one through the

Self-Hosting

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 22, 2026. Gitea CVE Hits 30K Servers, Percona Turns 20, Sway Adds HDR

Another week, another pile of news for anyone running their own infrastructure. This one was loaded. A four-year-old Gitea flaw left tens of thousands of container registries reading like an open book. Percona threw itself a 20th birthday party and announced a new MySQL foundation in the same breath. Sway

Keycloak

Inside Keycloak's Offline Tokens: How Long-Lived Sessions Actually Work

You're building a CLI tool. The user logs in once, your tool grabs a token, and then a few hours later everything breaks. The refresh token expired with the SSO session, and now your background job is asking the user to open a browser at 3 AM. This

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 23 Notable Releases This Week (May 17-24, 2026)

Another busy week across the catalog. Mastodon shipped coordinated security backports across three major versions, Appsmith hit v2.0, and the database side stayed loud with ClickHouse pushing both stable and LTS updates. Here's the full rundown of what landed between May 17 and May 24, 2026. 🚨 Security

WordPress

Adding Object Cache to WordPress with Redis (Step by Step)

Every WordPress site hits the same wall. Pages start fast, traffic grows, the database query count creeps up, and one day your dashboard takes six seconds to load and your admin-ajax requests start timing out. The fix is rarely "buy more CPU." It's almost always object

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 21, 2026. Bambu Sues OrcaSlicer Dev, MkDocs Forks, Open Source Endowment Launches

Quiet week? Not quite. A 3D printer manufacturer is suing the developer who restored cloud printing in a fork, MkDocs just lost its last serious maintainer and three forks are now competing for its corpse, and a 501(c)(3) finally got stood up to pay open source maintainers a

Security

How to Set Up Wazuh for Self-Hosted SIEM and Threat Detection

Splunk Enterprise starts at around $2,000 per GB ingested per year. For an SMB pushing 50 GB of logs a day, that math gets ugly fast. So when somebody asks me what to deploy when they need a real SIEM but don't have a Fortune 500 budget,

Comparison

Gitea vs GitLab: Which Self-Hosted Git Server in 2026?

If you're shopping for a self-hosted Git server in 2026, the choice usually comes down to two: Gitea or GitLab. They sound similar on a feature checklist. They are not the same animal at all. I've run both in production for different teams, and I'

GitLab

Self-Hosted GitLab + Elestio: Set Up CI/CD from Your Own Git

If your code lives on a self-hosted GitLab instance, deploying it to a managed platform usually means writing your own pipeline scripts, juggling SSH keys, or running a custom runner somewhere. Plenty of you have told us you don't want to mirror private repos to GitHub or GitLab.

Product Update

We Shipped a New Elestio Dashboard, Here's What Changed

The Elestio dashboard you logged into this week looks different. Same platform underneath, but the path from "I need a Postgres cluster" to "here's a connection string" got shorter, and a few things we used to bury behind menus now sit on the page

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