Templaro.com has picked up stakes and moved from A2 Hosting to Opalstack. The site started at io.com (io.com/~kontakt) in 1997, the heyday of animated gifs and PERL CGI scripts with now laughable security measures. IOCOM began as Steve Jackson Games’ Illuminati Online BBS (the one raided in the early 90s by the US secret service to investigate conspiracy theories). By he late 90s, it had morphed into a very welcoming early ISP, a favorite of PERL developers. Unfortunately, it was bought out and the new corporate overlords absolutely screwed the pooch.
In 2007, I moved the site to A2 hosting, which I believe had its servers in Michigan, USA. They had a typical PHPish site with standard cpanel, fantastico, and the usual bells and whistles of the era. There was one hiccup about a decade back as they moved my account from one machine to another and broke a lot of things, but nothing irreparable.
A2 Hosting was rebranded as Hosting.com in 2025 and this had little impact on day to day use, but I had the sense in the years leading up to it that they were more and more aiming for casual users. I often bumped up against some limitations on CPU and bandwidth (as bursts, minimal in the big picture). I found them relatively expensive and not great on the customer service front, particularly in a technical capacity, so I set sail for new shores.
Templaro.com is now on Opalstack, which has competitive pricing in terms of what I actually need. They also seem much more “with it”. I only put in one support ticket during migration and got a very competent answer back over night.
There is a bit of a learning curve with the new ISP – no cpanel here, but I was able to do everything that I needed. WordPress survived the move intact (as you can see). Setting up some python/flask applications took some jiggery-pokery, but noting exotic. I even update the few netscut calculators that are perhaps still clinically relevant to pediatrics, jumping them forward a few generations of PERL. The site is very much geared towards deploying software stacks and integrating with modern tools. Guess I’ll be reading the documentation for the next few weeks, but very happy to have new capabilties.