About

We have kept other people's websites running for more than twenty years. The scripts we sell here are the ones our own hosting customers asked us for, and we answer the email when one of them misbehaves.

Why the name is Rilato

In 1887 a young eye doctor in Warsaw paid out of his own pocket to print a forty-page booklet. He signed it Doktoro Esperanto — "one who hopes" — and the pen name stuck to the language instead of the man.

Ludwik Zamenhof had grown up in Białystok, a town where Poles, Jews, Germans and Russians walked the same streets and mistrusted each other in four languages. He decided that a good part of the trouble came down to something simple: for two people to understand each other, one of them always had to give up their own tongue and speak the other's. So he built a language that belonged to nobody. Regular, no exceptions, learnable in months instead of years, owned by no country and no empire — and he signed away the rights to it in that first book, so it would belong to everyone from the start.

It never became the universal language. Wars, borders and English saw to that. But it did not die either: nearly a hundred and forty years on, people still write in it, publish in it, travel and meet in it, and a few thousand children have grown up speaking it at home. It failed at conquering the world and quietly succeeded at something more durable — it survives because people choose it, not because anyone was ever made to.

In Esperanto, rilato means a relationship: a connection between two things. It comes from rilati, to relate. You say it ree-LAH-toh.

That is what these scripts are. Not platforms, not ecosystems — small pieces of plumbing that relate one thing you already own to another. The redirect manager relates a visitor to the right offer. The autoresponder relates you to the list you built. A short link relates a name you chose to a destination you control. None of them wants to sit in the middle of your business and charge rent; each one just joins two things that were yours to begin with.

And there is the other half of it. Zamenhof's idea was that you should not have to hand over your own language in order to be understood. Ours is that you should not have to hand over your data, your list or your links in order to be online. Buy the file, put it on your server, and it keeps working whether or not you keep paying anybody.

A language nobody owns,
for tools that are yours.

Twenty years of keeping sites up

We started in web hosting, and for a long time that is all we did. The first accounts were family and friends — the kind of customer who calls you on a Sunday because the site is down, and who you answer, because they are family. Word moved the way it does among people who trust each other, and the accounts that came next came by recommendation rather than advertising. We never did place an advertisement.

Hosting turned into building. A customer with a shop needs more than somewhere to put it, so we started designing and programming their ecommerce sites as well as keeping them online. That is where the scripts came from. Not from a product meeting — from customers describing a problem and asking whether we could write something for it. One needed traffic routed to the right page and the numbers to prove which page paid. Another had been attacked and wanted their forms and their admin area locked down properly. Somebody wanted short links on their own domain instead of a stranger's. We wrote each of those because the person asking was already ours to look after.

Then the pandemic arrived, and the whole world went online at once. Shops that had never sold anything over the internet needed to, urgently, and a lot of them were handed a monthly bill for every small thing they needed to do. The tools we had been quietly writing for our own customers for years were exactly what those businesses were now paying rent for. So we did the obvious thing: we stopped keeping them to ourselves. What had been a private benefit of hosting with us went up for sale to anybody who needed it.

Written for customers we already had.
Sold to everybody else since.

Why these scripts exist

Every one of them was written to solve a real problem on a real site, and every one of them runs on sites we look after before it is offered to anyone. That is why the Redirect Manager is on version twenty. It is not a product with a roadmap; it is a tool in daily use, and using something is how you keep finding what it should do better.

We run every one of these
before anybody else gets to.

How they are written

A few habits that hold across all of them:

• Documentation lives in the file. Open any script and the header tells you what it does, what changed in every version, and how to install it. A manual on a website drifts out of date; one inside the file cannot.
• One file where possible. The Redirect Manager, the Short Link Maker and the Split Tester are each a single PHP file. No Composer, no build step, no framework, nothing to go stale.
• Prepared statements, always. Every query, everywhere. No eval anywhere.
• Errors go to the log, not the visitor. A database message on a public page hands a stranger half a credential.
• Plain language in the comments. Including the Spanish ones. They are written for whoever opens the file in two years, which is usually one of us.

This site

Built the same way as the scripts: hand-written PHP, static pages, no database behind the content. The pages load in one request because there is nothing to query. It is also in two languages, English here and Spanish at /es, because half the people we would like to sell to think in Spanish.

The layout is a deliberate nod to the script shops of the early 2000s, which sold Perl CGI tools to exactly the same kind of person we are writing for. Red menu bar, boxes down the left, everything on one page. Those were built out of table tags and GIF corners; this is the same shape rebuilt in CSS, so it works on a phone.

Write to us

Before you buy, while you install, or when something breaks — the contact page reaches us directly, and a person reads it.