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.

Observability

Inside VictoriaMetrics: Why It Needs Less RAM Than Prometheus

The first time I watched Prometheus get OOM-killed at 3am, I did what everyone does: I gave it a bigger box. That worked for about four months. Then it happened again, and the box I needed next was expensive enough that somebody was going to ask me to justify

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 32, 2026. Proxmox Arm64, Rust AI Policy, Gitea CVE

Week 32 delivered the thing the homelab crowd has wanted since the first Raspberry Pi cluster: real Arm virtualization, officially supported. It was also the week Rust told its contributors to stop letting language models write their patches, and the week a 9.8 in Gitea reminded everyone that self-

Analytics

Umami vs PostHog: Which Self-Hosted Analytics in 2026?

You decided to stop handing your visitors to Google Analytics, went looking for a self-hosted replacement, and quickly ran into the two names everyone mentions: Umami and PostHog. On a features page they look like rivals. They are not, really. One is a lightweight web-traffic counter you can

AI

Give Your AI Agent a Backend with PocketBase

Give an AI agent a task and watch what it actually needs. It has to remember things between runs. It has to store the files it produces. It needs to know which user it is acting for. And the humans watching want to see what it is doing in real

Product Update

Introducing Historical Metrics: Look Back Up to 31 Days in Your Dashboard

You know the feeling. Someone pings you: "the app felt slow around 2 AM last night." You open your dashboard, and the live graph shows you exactly one thing: right now, everything is fine. The moment you needed is gone, because a live chart only ever knows the

Project Management

Self-Host Huly: One Open-Source App to Replace Jira, Linear, and Notion

Count the tabs your team lives in. Jira or Linear for issues. Notion or Confluence for docs. Slack for chat. A separate app for calls. Each one is a login, a monthly per-seat bill, and a place where half the context lives while the other half lives somewhere else.

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 13 New Releases This Week (July 26 - August 1, 2026)

It was a busy week across the Elestio catalog, with releases landing everywhere from databases to document management. This roundup covers the notable open-source updates from July 26 to August 1, 2026, so you can see what changed in the tools you actually run. No critical CVEs hit catalog

CRM

Self-Host Twenty: The Open-Source CRM You Actually Own

The moment that makes you hate your CRM is always the same. You add one more person to the team, the per-seat bill jumps again, and you realize you are paying a monthly rent that only ever goes up, for software that holds the single most valuable asset your

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 31, 2026. n8n AI Builder, Immich 3, Paperless-ngx 3.0.4

This was a patch-and-polish week across the self-hosted catalog. No dramatic launches, but two projects we care about shipped real upgrades, and a whole stack of tools you probably run pushed point releases worth taking. Here are the eight updates from the Elestio catalog that mattered this

AI

Self-Host Presidio: Redact PII Before It Ever Reaches Your LLM

I did the thing you're not supposed to do. A customer emailed us a support transcript, I wanted a quick summary, so I pasted the whole thing into a hosted LLM. Halfway through typing the prompt I noticed it: full name, email, a phone number, and the last

Databases

DBGate: One Database GUI for Your Whole Team

Every team has this setup, and every team pretends it is fine. One developer is on TablePlus, another swears by DataGrip, a third is SSHing into the box and running raw psql, and the new hire spent their first morning figuring out which VPN, which host, and which password gets

DevOps

Self-Host Healthchecks: Know the Instant a Cron Job Dies

Here is a fun way to lose a weekend. Your nightly database backup cron job has been failing silently for three weeks. The command errored out, cron swallowed the message, and nobody noticed, because a job that does not run does not send you anything. Then a disk dies, you

AI

Self-Host Langfuse to Trace Your AI Agents

Your agent worked fine in the demo. Then it hit production, and one afternoon a user asked it something ordinary and it burned through 40 tool calls, spent way too many tokens, and returned a confidently wrong answer. You open your logs and find a single line: "agent finished.

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 23 New Releases This Week (July 19-25, 2026)

Another busy week across the catalog, and this one leans heavily on security and one genuinely big rewrite. Paperless-ngx shipped a major version, Vaultwarden patched a stack of vulnerabilities, and the usual suspects in databases and observability kept the version numbers climbing. Here is everything worth knowing from July

Affine

AFFiNE 0.27: New Importers, Calendar View, and a Sync Warning

If you have ever tried to move years of notes out of Notion or Obsidian, you know the feeling. Your knowledge is right there, but it is locked inside someone else's app, and getting it out cleanly feels like defusing a bomb. AFFiNE has always pitched itself as

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 30, 2026. ServiceNow RCE, GitHub's $100M, Logseq 2.0

Another week, another reminder that self-hosting is equal parts freedom and responsibility. This week brought a nasty pre-auth exploit making the rounds, a community funding milestone with an asterisk, and a beloved note-taking app deciding to split itself in two. Grab a coffee. Here are the eight

Self-Hosted

Self-Host Centrifugo: Real-Time Updates Without Pusher

A few years ago I lost the better part of a month to a "simple" live notifications feature. Just a little bell icon that lights up when something happens. How hard could it be? I wrote a WebSocket server, then spent the next two weeks fighting reconnections, dropped

Self-Host FerretDB: MongoDB's API on PostgreSQL

A while back I watched a team ship a perfectly good prototype on MongoDB, then stall for a week when legal asked one question: what license is the database under? The answer, since 2018, is the SSPL, which is not an OSI-approved open-source license. For a product that

Self-Host GrowthBook: Feature Flags for AI Rollouts

The first time we shipped an AI summary feature, it went sideways at the worst possible hour. A model update started returning confidently wrong summaries for a chunk of users, and the only way to turn it off was a code change, a CI run, and a deploy. That is

Quickwit + S3: Sub-Second Log Search Without Elasticsearch

I got a cloud bill once where the log storage line was bigger than the compute line. Not the app servers, not the database. The logs. We were paying premium block-storage prices to keep three replicas of data nobody looked at until something broke. If you have ever run

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 26 New Releases This Week (July 12-18, 2026)

Another busy week across the Elestio catalog. Twenty-six stable releases landed between July 12 and 18, with a heavy run of identity and database updates, a fresh Ghost, and a major Paperless-ngx beta on the horizon. Here's everything worth updating for, grouped by category. Security note

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 29, 2026. SharePoint Zero-Day, Nextcloud Migration, KVM Escape

Some weeks the theme picks itself. This week it was trust: who you hand your infrastructure to, and what happens when that trust turns out to be misplaced. Microsoft shipped a SharePoint zero-day that was already being exploited, a German state walked away from SharePoint entirely in the same

AI

OpenHands: A Sandbox for Your Coding Agent, Not Your Laptop

Here's a question I kept dodging until it bit me: when your coding agent runs rm -rf, whose machine is it running on? For most of last year, the honest answer for me was "my laptop." I'd point Claude Code or the OpenHands agent

DevOps

Self-Host NATS: Lightweight Messaging for Your Apps and AI Agents

Every distributed system I've ever built started the same way: two services talking over HTTP. Then it's five services, each one hardcoding the others' URLs, and one restarts during a deploy while three callers time out. Suddenly you're bolting retry loops and circuit

DevOps

Self-Host Infisical: A Secrets Manager for Your Apps and Agents

Here's a confession: for years my idea of "secrets management" was a .env file that lived in three places, drifted out of sync in all of them, and occasionally got pasted into a Slack thread so a teammate could unblock themselves. Then someone rotates a database