Web Hosting : CNAME & SSL

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This web hosting thread started by LukeSc on 13 December 2008

I have a website where people can make a page off of our sub-domain. So lets say my sub-domain is my.domain.com. They can specify a page name to go off the domain. So if they picked “mypage” it would be something like:

http ://my.domain.com/mypage

The limitation is if “mypage” is already taken by someone else, it cannot be used and they have to choose a different name.

To get around the limitation, we allow them to CNAME their own domain to my.domain.com. So lets say they cname “theirdomain.com” to “my.domain.com”. They can then use any page name they want for their domain.

Now this works great for HTTP, but with HTTPS it doesn’t. We have an ssl certificate installed for my.domain.com, which only works for my.domain.com. We want their cname’d domain to also be secured.

The only way I know of doing this is by installing another certificate for that domain. Currently I do this through WHM for the cPanel account the site is on. With HTTP all they have to do is set the CNAME, and not action is required of us. But with the ssl certificate, it requires us to install a certificate for them.

So my question is: what options do I have available to me?

Is there some kind of “wildcard” certificate that does any domain (not just one)?

Is there any way I can allow them to install their own certificate through our site for their domain?

Any way to have PHP handle all the SSL stuff instead of apache?

If they need their own SSL certificate, that’s fine. I just need a way to do it where we don’t have to do anything for them (I don’t want to have to login to WHM or cPanel).

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