SSL Certificates
Well, we are finally completely switched over. In order to develop our new site, we picked up the domain name practicalecommerce.net, which we used to develop on. Once we went live, we needed to switch to .com. I thought I would outline our approach to doing this in case anyone was interested.
The first problem was our SSL. Without going into detail, let's just say I learned something during the course of this one. We had to install a certificate for our .net domain in order to ensure that our subscription form was secure during the switch. Since DNS usually takes up to 72 hours to change worldwide (sometimes longer depending on your ISP), we had all traffic re-directed to .net during this time.
Once the change was final, we then "parked" our .com domain name onto the same hosting account (IP address) that our .net account points to. Since the SSL has to be either .com or .net, we then had to un-installl the .net SSL and install one for the .com domain name. Here is where the fun comes in.
To make sure that the site is consistent, secure, and not creating duplicates for search engines, all requests to .net (and the other domain names that we own) get changed to .com via some mod_rewrite rules. This ensures that we can have all of our domain names pointing to one site, without duplicate indexes. It also ensures that all secure transactions are forced to .com so that our certificate is validated.
Also, to anyone dealing with SSL certificates, it's important to note that a certificate is issued on a domain name basis. This means that practicalecommerce.com and www.practicalecommerce.com are different. Make sure to be consistent between the domain name that you are using for secure transactions and the domain name that the SSL is issued to. In other words, if your certificate is for examplesite.com, don't have your secure form showing as www.examplesite.com. This can be easily controlled via mod_rewrite.
1 Comment
Dragon says:
I appreciate that bit of information, especially since I was pondering whether or not I should get a certificate. Now, all I need to do is find out more about mod-rewrite.
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