Secure Site Questions

[mtiwebmaster]

I have a couple of questions about how TCH handles secure sites.

 

With our current host, the secure portion of our website is accessed by our customers through a totally different url, as opposed to being under our own domain name. Would that be the same with TCH? It's not a big deal since the customer is normally accessing the secure stuff through links from the non-secure pages, but I was wondering how it works here.

 

From my point of view as webmaster, when I ftp in to our current site there are two subdirectories: www for non-secure stuff, and ssl for secure stuff. How does that work with TCH?

 

Lastly, how do I go about transferring the certificate from our current host? I wasn't the webmaster when the site was set up, and I'm not even sure where they got their certificate from, so I'm not real familiar with how this process goes.

 

Thanks,

Erick Pew

Music Theatre of Idaho webmaster

[TweezerMan]

- With your own SSL certificate, both the secure and non-secure portions of your web site would be accessed under your domain name. Secure links would begin with 'https://your-TCH-domain.com/', and non-secure links would begin with 'http://your-TCH-domain.com/'.

 

- There is only a 'www' directory on TCH accounts (which is a just a link to the actual 'public_html' directory on your account). If you want to use a separate directory for your secure site, you could create an 'ssl' directory (for example) within your www/public_html directory on the server.

 

- I'm not sure about how you would transfer it, but I do know that TCH has to install the SSL certificate for you, so the Help Desk may be able to assist you in transferring it as well.

 

Hope this helps...

[TCH-Bruce]

You can also use a shared SSL on the server but the links would take on a different domain than your domain name. The links would then appear as 'https://www.sslX.com/userid/'

 

Chcek out the SSL help pages

[mtiwebmaster]

You can also use a shared SSL on the server but the links would take on a different domain than your domain name. The links would then appear as 'https://www.sslX.com/userid/'

 

Chcek out the SSL help pages

 

I didn't set up our account with our current host (in fact I've never gone through this process before) so I wasn't aware exactly how the SSL was working there. After some digging I've discovered that we don't have our own certificate, but are instead using shared SSL on the current host. I'm thinking we will want to go the same way here since it is free.

 

So with the free shared SSL with TCH, when you link to a page through the https://www.sslX.com/userid URL, is the www directory still the root directory? In other words, if I wanted to access a page that was in www/ssl/somepage.html, would the URL be https://www.sslX.com/userid/ssl/somepage.html?

 

Just trying to make sure I understand how this all works!

 

Also, is the free shared SSL enabled by default on all TCH accounts, or do I need to request it when I sign up?

 

Thanks,

 

Erick

[TweezerMan]

Yes, the URL would be as you describe it, and no, you don't need to do anything to enable the shared SSL on your server before you can use it.