I've purchased a certificate via Winhost but have absolutely no idea how to set it up or config it. Do I just need to make the pages that I want secure (log in , sign up etc) prefixed with the https and everything automatically works behind the scenes or do I need to write code or ?? How do I designate a page as a using ssl page - does that mean I need to use absoluteld fully qualified URL's for those pages? I did a search thru these forums and I'm not finding the answers I need so forgive me please if this is a redunant question. Thanks Devon
I think you have a mis-perception on how a SSL certificate works. A SSL certificate does not get attached to a file or a folder but to the account itself. I don't know what your domain name is so I will use an example. We will say your domain name is mydomain.com If you installed a SSL certificate on your account you can pull up http://mydomain.com and it will pull up your site. Now, since you have a SSL certificate you can type in your browsers address bar https://mydomain.com. Notice that the "s" on "https" makes it encrypted and any website from then on will be transmitted over the Internet in an encrypted format. So if you type https://mydomain.com/default.aspx or https://mydomain.com/folder1/default.aspx they will be encrypted. What most people want to do is to try to pass the contact page in encrypted forma or the login page in encrypted format. So if someone types http://mydomain.com/login.aspx they want it to be encrypted. To achieve this they need to write a redirect script. If someone types http://mydomain.com/login.aspx, it will automatically get redirected to https://mydomain.com/login.aspx.
Ray Thank you so much! That was the exact info I was looking for. I suspected it was something like that. I hope this post is useful to other newbies like me in the future.. Gracias... devon
Update In case there is anyone out there with a similar issue as I had - this is the script I create for the page load event which creates the functionality that Ray recommended about. if (!Request.IsSecureConnection) { string redirectUrl = Request.Url.ToString().Replace("http:", "https:"); Response.Redirect(redirectUrl); }
