opnlnk.co

Maker

📌

Hello, everyone! The story is that my company bought a .com domain name for our product. As we don’t want to do a full switch over to the .com domain at the moment, I thought the best way to use it would be to redirect it to the current .io domain name. Surprisingly, this was actually a more complicated process than I imagined. When I was just using the DNS, the domain forwarding worked fine for HTTP redirects. The issue was with SSL redirects. For example, http://domain.com → http://domain.io [worked] http://domain.com → https://domain.io [worked] https://domain.com → https://domain.io [didn't work] It kept returning the dreaded SSL not secure error. Eventually giving up trying to do this with just the DNS, I wrote a Netlify dummy website and created a redirect built into the configuration, and got SSL working. I found out that Google Domains does SSL domain forwarding for free when your domain is registered with them and there are other DNS services like DNSimple that charge a fee for SSL redirection. With Google Domains going away, I'm not sure it's going to be as reliable. I thought, you know… maybe there needs to be a service that allows you to do domain redirection with SSL auto-configured and all you’d need to do is add a few records to your existing DNS service. So, I built a service like this called SurpriseFlow and it solves all the problems I’ve mentioned above. Further, I've added a selector for whether the redirect should be permanent or temporary so that you can control the effect it has on SEO. I’m honestly not sure if this service is actually required or if I’m missing some massive industry plot point—I’m open to being educated further! For now, this product exists and yeah, I’m open to feedback. Let me know what you think! :)

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2yr ago