New Elestio Documentation: What's Inside and Where to Start

I'll admit something slightly embarrassing for someone who writes about Elestio every day: I used to find answers in our old docs by Googling them. The content was there, but it was spread across "books" and "chapters", and unless you already knew that the CI/CD guide lived in one book and the custom domain page lived in another, you were going to click around for a while.

That's over. The Elestio documentation at docs.elest.io has been rebuilt from scratch: new structure, new design, and a lot more content. Here's a tour of what changed and where I'd start, depending on what you're trying to do.

What Changed

The short version: about 180 pages, organized around what you're actually doing instead of how the content was originally written.

A few things you'll notice in the first ten seconds:

• Real search. Hit Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K on macOS) from any page and start typing a feature name.
• One sidebar, six sections. Getting Started, Platform Features, Software Guides, Developer Tools, Account and Billing, and FAQ. No more guessing which book a topic belongs to.
• A summary at the top of every page. Each page opens with one sentence telling you what it covers, and an "On this page" outline sits on the right for the longer guides.
• Light and dark mode. It follows your system setting by default, and there's a toggle if you disagree with your system.
• Direct links to every heading. Hover a heading, grab the link, and send a teammate straight to the exact step instead of "scroll down, it's somewhere in there".

Where Everything Lives

Here's the map. Bookmark the section you'll use most.

Five Sections Worth Reading First

1. The Elestio CLI and the AI agent skill

This is the part I'm most excited about. The CLI docs cover installation, deploying, managing, backups, CI/CD, providers, troubleshooting and a full command reference. Getting started takes three commands:

npm install -g elestio
elestio login --email "you@example.com" --token "your_api_token"
elestio auth test

From there, elestio deploy postgresql --project 112 --name prod-postgres gives you a managed PostgreSQL instance (use your own project ID; elestio projects lists them). The agent skill page explains how to hand the same commands to Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or OpenCode. The part I like: the skill makes the agent ask you for the provider, region, plan, name and admin email one by one before it deploys anything. No surprise VMs on your bill.

2. Object Storage and Infinidisk

Object Storage now has 14 pages: buckets, API keys scoped to folders or IPs, lifecycle rules, CORS, webhooks, a recycle bin, and imports from Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2 or Google Cloud Storage. Pricing is spelled out too: $0.02 per GB per month for standard single-region storage, and no fee for data going out.

The sleeper hit is Infinidisk, an open-source tool that mounts a bucket as a regular Linux disk. Read the "how it works" section before you put a database on it: writes go to the bucket in the background, so a hard crash can lose the last few seconds.

3. Software guides that go past "hello world"

The Software Guides give eight databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Valkey, KeyDB, ClickHouse, TimescaleDB and Hydra) plus Keycloak the same four-part set: connect (the PostgreSQL page alone has Node.js, Python, PHP and Go examples), clusters, how-to guides and migration. If you've ever asked "how do I move my existing Postgres over without downtime?", the answer is now a page, not a support ticket.

4. AI DevOps, including what it costs

The AI DevOps page is a good example of the new docs being upfront. It explains that a backup is taken before any change, that every command runs in a terminal you can watch, and exactly how credits work: 60, 120 or 300 per service per month depending on your support level, and $1 per extra session once you run out.

5. Security, in one place

The Security section covers the defaults (SSL, firewall, rate limiter, output cache, termination protection) and the less common setups: Cloudflare Tunnel, IPv6, PTR records, SMTP, MFA, and even serving a service as a Tor onion site.

Where to Start, Depending on Who You Are

• New to Elestio: Getting Started, then deploy one service and read the Service Dashboard pages while it boots.
• Developer or DevOps engineer: the CLI docs, then CI/CD pipelines and the Terraform provider.
• Migrating from another host: the migration guides (WordPress, MySQL, Jenkins, Mastodon, Superset, custom apps) and the migration page of your database.
• Finance or ops: Account and Billing, plus the legal pages if your DPO is asking about subcontractors.

Troubleshooting: Can't Find Something?

An old bookmark returns a 404. Links from the previous docs (URLs containing /books/) don't map to the new structure. Press Ctrl+K and search the page title instead.

Search doesn't find your exact phrase. Search for the feature or the software name rather than pasting a full error message. Pages are titled by what you're doing ("Network Firewall", "Custom Domain and SSL/TLS"), not by what went wrong.

Your question isn't covered. Check the Troubleshooting FAQ first, then open a ticket from your dashboard. If you pick the affected service, AI DevOps suggests a fix before the ticket is sent. The Discord community is linked from the docs too.

You spotted a mistake. Tell support. Docs only get better when people complain about them, and I'd rather hear it than have you quietly Google around it like I used to.

Go Take a Look

Open docs.elest.io and look up the thing you've been meaning to set up. If you don't have an account yet, pick a service from the 400+ fully managed open source apps and keep the docs open in the other tab.

Thanks for reading ❤️ See you in the next one 👋