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I have a client for whom I have developed a PHP based Facebook project, who is hosting their main website on IIS with ASP and no access to PHP. The original plan was that we will host the FB campaign because of this, but the client now wants to host it under their main domain name, which was not a requirement initially.

So they have created a sub domain to point to my server's IP to host the site. In short:

  1. They created fb.theirdomain.com
  2. They put my IP address in the DNS records to point to my server
  3. fb.theirdomain.com does not have SSL.
  4. My server has SSL.

Facebook needs SSL to work, as far as I know.

So - my question is: WILL THIS WORK?

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    This is not a forum at all. I'd recommend you to read through serverfault.com/about .
    – Pothi Kalimuthu
    Oct 24, 2013 at 9:10
  • Geez, Pothi, you call it a Q&A thingamabob and I call it a forum. Is that term that important? I do understand that maybe my requirements are not clear enough and I apologize for that (I am not sure how to phrase it, so sue me), but your comment is just snide.
    – Kobus Myburgh
    Oct 24, 2013 at 11:22

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What you're asking isn't very clear.

If you mean "can I redirect the client from http://app.theirdomain.com to https://www.mydomain.com using HTTP redirect or HTML redirect, then the answer is yes. The caveats, of course, is that the user will see your URL in their browser pretty much immediately when they go to the app web site, making it pretty pointless to have created the subdomain in the first place.

But your issue is actually a failure to properly define your requirements.

Either you didn't define the requirements for your product properly or your customer didn't produce the proper requirement for their project themselves. In both case, you're trying to fix this failure with band-aids and that will NOT result in anything satisfactory.

The simplest way to salvage that situation is for your customer to deliver a server to your specifications and use a valid certificate. If they really cannot provide your with a sytem with Apache and PHP (either internally or by renting a vm), then they could explore the possibility of simply adding PHP to their IIS web site (it's trivially easy), get a proper certificate and install it themselves.

Another possibility is for then to request a certificate for their sub-domain and for you to configure your server to serve it. Since they already have defined a sub-domain, all you need to do is add an IP address to your server, your customer to link that IP address to their sub-domain in their DNS and for you to configure Apache to serve it over SSL using the certificate for their sub-domain.

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  • Nice answer, +1 extra if I could for "your issue is actually a failure to properly define your requirements".
    – MadHatter
    Oct 24, 2013 at 9:40
  • Hi @Stephane. Thanks for your answer. I appreciate it. The client indicated that he was going to host with me, which means I have the requirements in place. Now after it is done, he wants to host at his main website host. While this makes sense to do, it is not what we agreed upon. I was just trying to get a possible solution before pushing back and say that it can not be done. Due dilligence and all... :-) It is getting evident that I am not stating my requirement ready - sorry. I will edit the question and retry. Thanks!
    – Kobus Myburgh
    Oct 24, 2013 at 11:25
  • @MadHatter, tsk tsk. Do you know of a manual how to write English in such a way that you pro's out there understand what I mean? I do pretty well in English, but it is not my home language, so you can leave the snide remarks for yourself :-)
    – Kobus Myburgh
    Oct 24, 2013 at 11:27
  • Kobus, my issue isn't with your English, it's with the level of detail provided. If you'd said, say, "I want the client to visit app.theirdomain.com, then receive a 301 redirect to mydomain.com. Can I do this, what SSL certificates will I need, and what will the client's browser experience be?", I'd have much less to complain about even if you'd left out half the verbs and articles. I note that your edited question is much better, so perhaps that shows my comment was constructive rather than snide.
    – MadHatter
    Oct 24, 2013 at 11:33
  • @Madhatter, thanks. You assume though, that I knew what what I was looking for was "301 redirect". I am aware of that term, but I did not know that this is what happens in the DNS section of my control panel. I guess you learn something new every day.
    – Kobus Myburgh
    Oct 24, 2013 at 11:49

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