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.

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,

Qdrant vs Weaviate vs Milvus: Which Vector Database for Your RAG Pipeline?

You've decided your AI app needs a vector database. Great. Now you're staring at three open-source options — Qdrant, Weaviate, and Milvus — and they all claim to be the fastest, most scalable, most production-ready choice. I've spent the last few months testing all three, and

meilisearch

Meilisearch vs Typesense vs Algolia: Which Search Engine Fits Your Stack?

You need search. Not "maybe eventually" search — real, typo-tolerant, sub-50ms, search-as-you-type search. The kind where your users start typing "runnng shoes" and instantly see running shoes. The question is: which engine do you pick? Meilisearch, Typesense, and Algolia are the three names that keep coming up.

paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx on Elestio: Automating Document Ingestion, OCR Processing, and Smart Tagging

Paperless-ngx can ingest your documents. You already knew that. But most people stop at "drop PDF in folder, let OCR do its thing" and never touch the automation engine sitting right underneath. That's a mistake. The workflow system, matching algorithms, and storage path templates can turn

open-webui

Open WebUI Just Gave Your AI a Real Computer

Most AI chat interfaces let you talk to a model. Open WebUI lets you hand it a terminal and say "figure it out." That's not hyperbole. With the Open Terminal feature, your LLM can install packages, run scripts in any language, manage files, and spin up

metabase

Your Team Doesn't Need Tableau: How Metabase Turns Any Database Into a Dashboard Anyone Can Use

Tableau charges $75 per user per month. Looker averages $150,000 per year. Power BI just raised its prices by 40%. Meanwhile, over 4,200 companies are running Metabase, an open-source analytics tool that does 80% of what those platforms do, and it costs nothing in license fees. If your

mautic

Mautic on Elestio: Building Automated Email Campaigns, Lead Scoring, and Multi-Channel Workflows

HubSpot charges $890/month for their Professional tier with 10,000 contacts. Mautic gives you every feature, unlimited contacts, and full data ownership for the cost of a server. If you've been putting off self-hosting your marketing automation, this is the guide that gets you from zero to

open-source

OpenClaw Explained: How the Fastest-Growing Open-Source Project Became a Self-Hosted AI Agent for Everyone

You've probably heard the name by now. OpenClaw went from zero to 250,000 GitHub stars in roughly 60 days, surpassing React as the most-starred software project on the platform. React took over a decade to get there. OpenClaw did it before most people figured out what it

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 10, 2026. NGINX Ingress Is Gone, the Pentagon Goes Open Source, and AI Code Gets Banned Again

Welcome back to Self-Hosted Weekly, your Friday roundup of everything that matters in the open-source and self-hosting world. This week: a major Kubernetes retirement finally hits, the Pentagon goes open source, and the AI-generated code debate escalates again. 1. NGINX Ingress Is Officially Dead The March 2026 retirement deadline for

Azure

Elestio Now Supports Custom Azure VNet and Subnet Selection

If you've ever deployed infrastructure on Azure and thought "I really wish I could keep everything inside my own network," you're not alone. One of the most requested features from our Azure users just landed: you can now select your own Resource Group, Virtual

SCALE 23x Takeaways: What North America's Biggest Open-Source Conference Tells Us About Self-Hosting in 2026

If you want to understand where self-hosting is headed, skip the analyst reports. Go to Pasadena. SCALE 23x, North America's largest community-run open-source conference, is happening right now (March 5-8, 2026) at the Pasadena Convention Center. Over 3,500 attendees, 120+ exhibitors, and 16 co-located events are packed

Gitea vs GitLab: Why Small Teams Are Choosing a 170MB Binary Over a 4GB Monolith

GitLab is a fantastic platform. It's also a 4GB monolith that wants 8-16GB of RAM just to sit there and wait for your five-person team to push code. For a lot of teams, that's like renting a stadium to play pickup basketball. Gitea is the opposite

ClickHouse vs TimescaleDB vs InfluxDB: Picking the Right Analytics Database for Your Self-Hosted Stack

Not all data moves the same way. Some arrives in steady streams from IoT sensors. Some lands in massive batches from event pipelines. Some sits quietly for months until someone needs a year-over-year comparison on a Tuesday afternoon. The database you pick for analytics determines how painful that Tuesday afternoon

Why Every Growing Brand Needs a Community Forum (And How Discourse Makes It Easy)

Your community is already talking about you. The question is whether those conversations are happening in a place you own, or scattered across Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Slack channels you'll never find again. For growing brands, this is more than a branding problem. It's a

DevOps

Promtail Is Dead: How to Migrate Your Log Pipeline to Grafana Alloy Before It Breaks

Promtail hit end-of-life on March 2, 2026. If you're still running it, your log pipeline is now officially unsupported. No more security patches, no more bug fixes, no more updates. Grafana merged Promtail's code into Alloy over a year ago, and the Loki Helm chart is