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.

Docmost

Docmost vs Outline: Which Self-Hosted Notion Alternative in 2026?

Your team's knowledge is scattered across Notion pages, a few Google Docs nobody can find, and three Slack threads someone swears had the answer. At some point you decide you want a real wiki, one you host yourself, where the data is yours and the bill does not

n8n

n8n vs Activepieces: Which Self-Hosted Automation Platform in 2026?

Your Zapier bill crept past a few hundred dollars a month, the task limits started biting right when a workflow finally got useful, and somewhere in there you thought: I could just run this myself. Good instinct. The two open-source names you keep hitting are n8n and Activepieces, and

Self-Hosting

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 24, 2026. Jira's Self-Hosted Exit, Postgres 19 Beta, Home Assistant 2026.6

Some weeks the self-hosted world coasts. This was not one of them. The project behind your next Jira replacement shipped a migration tool, Postgres dropped its first 19 beta, and Home Assistant gave its dashboards a long-overdue rethink. Here are the eight stories worth your time this week,

Directus

Directus vs Strapi: Which Headless CMS Should You Self-Host in 2026?

You've decided to self-host your content backend instead of paying per-seat for a SaaS CMS. Good call. Now you're staring at the two names everyone lands on: Directus and Strapi. They look interchangeable from the outside, both give you a slick admin panel and

Supabase

How to Self-Host Supabase on Elestio (Full Setup Guide)

Supabase gives you a Postgres database, authentication, instant REST and realtime APIs, file storage, edge functions, and an admin studio, all from one open-source stack. The hosted version is great until you hit the moment every growing team hits: you want your data on infrastructure you control, with no

Authentik

Authentik + Grafana: Add Single Sign-On to Your Dashboards

The first time someone leaves your team, you remember every place they had a login. Grafana is always one of them, and it's always the one nobody disabled. Local Grafana accounts are fine for a homelab of one, but the moment two or more people share dashboards, you

AI

AI Writes Code 7x Faster. Shipping It Is the New Bottleneck.

Every engineering team has felt it over the past two years: code appears faster than ever, and somehow nothing reaches users any sooner. A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the nonprofit that publishes much of the economics research later cited in policy and the

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 34 Notable Releases This Week (June 1-7, 2026)

Another busy week across the Elestio catalog: 34 notable stable releases landed between June 1 and June 7, including a new Valkey minor, a feature-packed Weaviate release, and coordinated Redis patches across three release lines. Here's everything worth knowing before your next update window. Security Alerts Redis:

Self-Hosting

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 23, 2026. Supabase Hits $10.5B, Euro-Office Ships, ChromaDB CVSS 10

Welcome back to Self-Hosted Weekly. This week had a bit of everything: a database company hitting a $10.5 billion valuation, Europe shipping its sovereign office suite (with a licensing fight attached), and three CVEs that should jump to the top of your patch queue, including a perfect 10

Security

Vaultwarden vs Passbolt: Which Self-Hosted Password Manager for Your Team?

Somebody on your team just pasted the production database password into Slack again. You knew it was time for a proper password manager months ago, you just didn't want to pay per-seat pricing for the privilege of storing your own secrets. Good news: two solid open-source

PostgreSQL

Inside Postgres pg_stat_statements: Find Slow Queries Without an APM

Production Postgres falls over for one of three reasons: a missing index, the same query running ten thousand times when it should run ten, or a join that decided today is the day to seq-scan a 50-million-row table. The trick is knowing which one. Without an APM

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

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

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

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

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

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.