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.

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

Elestio

One-Click DNS Setup: Connect Your Domain to Elestio via Cloudflare in Seconds

Look, I'm going to be real with you: configuring DNS records is nobody's idea of a good time. You deploy a service, you're excited to use it, and then you spend 20 minutes squinting at your registrar's control panel trying to figure

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 15, 2026. Trivy Breach Hits the EU, Linux 7.0 Incoming, and Nix Gets a CVSS 9

This was the week the open-source supply chain broke in the most spectacular way possible. A poisoned version of Trivy — the vulnerability scanner half the industry trusts to keep them safe — gave attackers the keys to the European Commission's cloud. Meanwhile, Linux 7.0 is days away, OpenSSH

Integration

Airflow + Supabase: Build an Automated Data Pipeline on Elestio

If you've ever found yourself writing cron jobs to move data between services, you already know why you need a proper orchestrator. Apache Airflow is the industry standard for defining, scheduling, and monitoring data workflows — and Supabase gives you a production-ready PostgreSQL backend with a REST API, auth,

Comparison

Meilisearch vs Typesense: Which Search Engine for Your App?

If you're building search into your app and you've already ruled out Algolia's pricing, you've probably landed on the same two options everyone else has: Meilisearch and Typesense. Both are open-source, both offer instant search-as-you-type, and both promise to be the "

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 8 Notable Releases This Week (March 29 - April 5, 2026)

Another week, another round of releases across Elestio's 400+ open-source catalog. This week was dominated by security patches — two critical CVEs got fixed, Jellyfin shipped urgent security updates, and Ollama went on a patch marathon with three back-to-back releases. Let's get into it. Security Alerts Three

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 14, 2026. Gemma 4 Goes Apache 2.0, Ingress NGINX Is Dead, and Docker Gets Patched

Welcome back to Self-Hosted Weekly, your Friday roundup of everything that matters in open-source and self-hosting. This was a big one — Google dropped its most capable open models ever, Kubernetes lost its most popular ingress controller, and Docker shipped a critical security patch. Let's get into it. 1.

Comparison

RustFS vs SeaweedFS vs Garage: Which MinIO Alternative Should You Pick?

MinIO is effectively dead. In December 2025, the project entered "maintenance mode" — no new features, no PR reviews, not even guaranteed security patches. Before that, the web UI got stripped out and locked behind a $96K/year enterprise license. If you're running MinIO today, you'

Comparison

Outline vs BookStack: Which Self-Hosted Wiki for Your Team?

You need a wiki. Maybe your team's knowledge lives in a mess of Google Docs, Slack threads, and "ask Sarah, she knows." You've narrowed it down to two self-hosted options: Outline and BookStack. Both are open-source, both are excellent — but they solve the problem

Keycloak

Keycloak + Grafana: Set Up SSO for Your Monitoring Dashboard

If you're running Grafana for monitoring and Keycloak for identity, there's a good chance your team is still logging into both separately. That's fine for two people. It's a nightmare for twenty. Here's how to wire them together so your

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 28 New Releases This Week (March 22-29, 2026)

Every week, the open-source projects in the Elestio catalog ship new versions — security patches, performance boosts, entirely new features. Keeping up is a full-time job. So we're doing it for you. Here's everything that shipped across our 400+ managed services during the week of March 22-29,

Databases

ClickHouse vs TimescaleDB vs InfluxDB: Which Time-Series Database for Your Analytics?

I've been running time-series workloads for years, and here's what nobody tells you upfront: picking the wrong database doesn't just slow things down — it shapes (and limits) every decision you make afterward. Your query patterns, your storage costs, even how your team thinks about

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 13, 2026. KubeCon Drops Major Updates, Langflow Gets a CVSS 9.3, and OpenAI Buys Python's Best Tools

Another week, another round of "update immediately" advisories and corporate open-source acquisitions that make everyone nervous. KubeCon Europe happened in Amsterdam. Langflow got a CVSS 9.3. OpenAI bought the tools half the Python ecosystem depends on. Here's what you need to know. KubeCon Europe 2026:

Grafana + Prometheus: Set Up Production Monitoring on Elestio

You're running services in production. Something breaks at 2 AM. By the time you notice, users have already noticed. The fix isn't more coffee — it's knowing something broke before anyone else does. Grafana and Prometheus are the monitoring stack that most of the industry

PostgreSQL 18: The 5 Features That Actually Matter for Production

Every major PostgreSQL release gets a changelog the length of a novel. Most of it won't change how you run your database. PostgreSQL 18 is different — a handful of features here genuinely reshape what production looks like. I've been testing PG18 since the September 2025 release.