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

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.

Keycloak

Keycloak + Nextcloud: Set Up Single Sign-On for Your Cloud Storage

You have Nextcloud for file storage. You have Keycloak for identity management. But your team still logs in twice — once for Keycloak, once for Nextcloud. That's one password too many, and one more place where credentials can leak. Connecting the two with OpenID Connect takes about 20 minutes.

Comparison

Supabase vs Appwrite vs PocketBase: Which Open-Source Backend for Your Next App?

Firebase changed its pricing again. You're not surprised — you've been here before. So you start looking at open-source backends you can actually own, and three names keep coming up: Supabase, Appwrite, and PocketBase. All three promise to replace Firebase. None of them do it the same

CI/CD

How to Migrate from GitHub Actions to Gitea Actions

In December 2025, GitHub announced a $0.002-per-minute fee on self-hosted runners for private repositories. The backlash was immediate — hundreds of comments, cost calculations showing $3,500/month increases for mid-size teams, and a 24-hour reversal. GitHub "postponed" the change. Not canceled — postponed. That word choice tells you

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 12, 2026. GTC Goes Open Source, $12.5M for FOSS Security, and Docker v29 Breaks Everything

Welcome back to the Self-Hosted Weekly. This week: NVIDIA went all-in on open-source AI at GTC, the Linux Foundation secured $12.5 million for FOSS security, a new secrets scanner was born, and Docker v29 is quietly breaking things. Let's get into it. 1. NVIDIA Goes Open Source

Security

How to Replace LastPass with Vaultwarden

In December 2022, LastPass disclosed that attackers had stolen encrypted vault backups for roughly 30 million users. That was bad. What's worse — three years later, those stolen vaults are still being cracked. Over $438 million in cryptocurrency has been traced back to that single breach, with thefts still

CI/CD

How to Use Private Docker Registries with Elestio CI/CD

If you've been running CI/CD pipelines on Elestio with public images, life was already pretty smooth. But the moment you needed to pull from a private registry — your company's internal images, a gated container, anything behind authentication — you hit a wall. That wall is now

Comparison

Chatwoot vs Zulip vs Rocket.Chat: Which Self-Hosted Chat Platform for Your Team?

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're searching for "self-hosted Slack alternative": Chatwoot, Zulip, and Rocket.Chat show up in every list, but they're not the same kind of tool. Picking the wrong one means rebuilding your communication stack six months

Elestio

Elestio 2026: New Site, AI Agents, Clusters, and More

We just redesigned elest.io from the ground up, and honestly, a fresh coat of paint was long overdue. But this isn't just a cosmetic facelift. The new site reflects where Elestio is heading: AI-native infrastructure, high-availability clusters, and a much sharper focus on who we serve and

Comparison

NocoDB vs Baserow: Which Open-Source Airtable Alternative Should You Pick?

Here's a sentence you've probably typed into Google: "open source Airtable alternative." And you probably landed on two names — NocoDB and Baserow. Both promise to free you from Airtable's per-seat pricing trap. Both let you self-host. But they solve the problem in

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 11, 2026. Dify Raises $30M, Rust Is Stable in the Linux Kernel, and FOSS Gets an Endowment

Look, it's been one of those weeks where the open-source ecosystem flexed in every direction at once. Dify closed a $30M round. Rust in the Linux kernel isn't experimental anymore. And someone finally came up with a funding model for FOSS that doesn't involve

Valkey vs Redis vs KeyDB: Which In-Memory Store After the License Change?

Look, if you've been in the Redis ecosystem for any length of time, the last two years have felt like a soap opera. License changes, community forks, corporate drama — the whole deal. And now you're staring at three options that all look suspiciously similar: Valkey, Redis,