http://www.omnis.com/webhosting_unix.php
They offer shared ssl, how can we as virtualmin users offer the same thing so that our clients can use ssl on their sites. I think this would be a big boost in helping us to get more clients since theres a lot of mom and pop shops that would love to sell online but need secure connections for their shopping carts that I can't offer them with name hosting.
It seems to me they must be doing virtual name hosting else they would just offer ssl on individual IP's, otherwise I see no reason to offer shared ssl.
Any clues how to go about setting something like this up?
Hey Adam,
It's reasonably easy to do. Basically, it's just standard old shared hosting that just happens to be encrypted. There are a few refinements of the old "https://domain.tld/~user" concept that can make it a bit fancier. For example, with a wild-card certficate (expensive to get, but not outlandishly so compared to the price of certs for 20 or 100 domains), you can have the site answer on user.domain.tld.
The latter type of domain can already be setup automatically in Virtualmin (and there would probably be no harm in making the whole site accessible via SSL on that domain--your users could just redirect to https when they need to do something securely), but I'm not sure off-hand how to setup Apache to use the wildcard certificate for these types of domains. The former type of domain (/~user) can also be enabled in Webmin, and I think I may have even enabled it by default (and if it isn't already, it probably will be enabled by default by the time all is said and done).
Note that in all cases, it has to be under the same second-level domain. The wildcard cert simply answers "true" for any subdomain of the one you sign up with. But you still can't do name-based virtual SSL hosting (it would look like a man-in-the-middle attack to the client browser).
I'll look into it and get back to you with specifics. Ping me if I don't respond in a day or two with a working example. And, of course, someone else here might know more than I on this issue.
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This is eaxctly what I want to do.
Can you tell me how to set this up?
i've found these guys to be good for quick SSL certs
http://www.rapidssl.com
They do a wildcard cert for £199, and a single cert for $69 which they will deliver immedeately.