Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Confused about SSL and HTTPS (but not baking)

cliffski

So apparently you get extra brownie points from google’s ranking now if you have an SSL certificate. I know more about cake-baking than SSL. (Always minimize time between mixing and putting it in the oven kids). I bought an SSL cert for positech.co.uk, and apparently my host installed it, but I don’t really know what is going on. They told me my IP changed as a result, but for what?  just web? FTP? cpanel? who knows…

What it now means is that this address is valid:

https://www.positech.co.uk

Whereas this still isn’t:

https://www.cliffski.com/ and of course none of my other domains are either, by positech is the most popular one anyway. You are probably at it right now.

Which is fine, and the positech address gives lots of nice green ‘this site is trustworthy(ish) reports in chrome and IE, and even very slightly in firefox:

ssl

So that’s just lovely, but  does it mean I should add a redirect in htaccess to redirect all http://www.positech.co.uk traffic to https://www.positech.co.uk? Is that what people do?

I know NOTHING. But I do know that if something makes my site more desirable to traffic for $50 a year I’m doing it :D

3 thoughts on Confused about SSL and HTTPS (but not baking)

  3. Personally I would recommend you do a redirect if you’ve already gone to the trouble of getting a secure connection for your site.
    It’s pretty simple to do. Just stick this in your .htaccess file:

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
    RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

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