Setting up SSL on website

Server Config
1

I am in the process of getting an SSL Certificate.

After getting it, what exactly do I do with it?

I am building an e-commerce site, and currently trying to get PayPal to work with my site. PayPal requires an HTTPS connection when it sends a user back to my site.

Honestly, I’m not sure how to make the certificate work… :-/

Debbie

2

I don’t have a lot of experience with this, but the one time I did it, when I bought the certificate, it came with installation instructions. Basically, it involves settings in your web hosting account, which will depend on who your web host is. So once you have the certificate, I’d suggest talking to the web host about what to do with it.

3

Definitely talk to your hosting provider, most of them should be able to install it for you.

4

No, what I meant was, how do I program my site so that the entire site comes up as HTTPS or at least certain pages come up HTTPS?

By default, when you go to my site, it will come up “http://www.MySite.com”

And if you navigate to another page via a link, you will get “http://www.MySite.com/SomeDirectory/SomeWebpage.php”

(I am programming in PHP, so maybe this thread needs to get moved.)

So that is what I don’t understand…

Debbie

5

Here’s a quick article that will allow you to for your website to use HTTPS

http://www.besthostratings.com/articles/force-ssl-htaccess.html

6

Nah, I didn’t move this, because I’m sure it’s not a programming issue. As I said, it’s just a matter of finding out how your host supports the certificate. Once it’s installed on your hosting account, all urls will read https. Forcing the urls to read https via htaccess is not a solution, as you need to pages to BE ssl protected, not just appear to be. (That’s my take, anyway.)

7

I’m pretty sure you have to program it into your PHP code. (I recall reading that in a book last year.)

Debbie

8

The procedure is simple, only if you have the programmers with you. You will first need to generate a csr file from your webhost. Send it to the certificate authorities. Receive the ssl cert from them and send it to your webhost, who will install it on your server.

9

You can do this on the server side or in PHP. If your server runs Apache, you can add a rewrite rules to automatically redirect your users to HTTPs pages based on the URL (regular expressions). In PHP, you can do the same by adding a condition that checks the URL and whether SSL is on, and redirect the user to https.