A few years ago I built a website for my sister-in-law’s bookstore. It worked fine until sometime in November. Her credit card company wanted some changes done to the servers to make them more secure and the hosting company took care of all of that. She doesn’t get a lot of orders so it was a few weeks before she noticed that she was not getting any new orders. When she went and looked at the site, she couldn’t get a secure connection. We’ve been going around with tech support and not getting anywhere because they insist that they can get into the secure pages with no problems. I’ve cleared caches, tried different browsers, tried private windows, I created a test page that is plain html with a text message saying “made it” - nothing gets me a secure connection. I can get to the test page with an http connection, but not https.
I’m not asking anyone to trouble shoot this for me, but I am hoping someone might have a theory about why it’s working for tech support and not anyone else. I don’t know anything about how servers are set up; could tech support be connected in a way that has them going in through a different port or ports than external connections do? I feel like that’s the key to this; why tech support can get in but no one else. If I can understand the answer to that, it might help me start asking the right questions about the root problem.
It would help to know what the error was.
If I had to guess, mine would be that it’s a certificate issue.
This could be so many things… you say you cannot get to the test page; what is the error message?
You are correct that the default port for “https://” is different from that of “http”, so make sure that port is not firewalled.
Also, redirect (HTTP 301) http to https in such a way that it is impossible to access your site via a non-secure connection. Furthermore here is a little SSL tester.
Do they fully understand the fact that whatever they did caused this issue? Because it sounds like you have not demonstrated that fact if they are saying it works, but does in fact, not.
There is no error message, the attempted connection just hangs.
This SSL tester says “Assessment failed: Unable to connect to the server”. One I had tried previously said no SSL certificate was found. The host company insists the certificate exists, and it did exist prior to the credit card changes. Also, it wasn’t supposed to expire until April of this year.
They are saying it works for them and so the problem has to be on our end.
This is a standard clueless tech support response. It is a web hosting service. There is only one “end,” as t’were. The “other” end could be any computer anywhere on the planet. If I were you , I would consider taking my web hosting business elsewhere. Morons.