Good news for you if your wiki uses a custom domain and you want to protect it by HTTPS. We can now install your SSL certificate without extra charges.

Here is the full story. Since the beginning of the year we can see increased interest in protecting wikis with SSL certificates. Wikis can be then available through secure HTTPS protocol, not only encrypting the transmission between a browser and a server, but also validating the identity of the website itself.

But there was a problem: if you wanted to use secure access (HTTPS) to your wiki, you could enable it in the admin panel (a Pro+ plan is needed anyway), but our default certificates can only secure wikis within the .wikidot.com domain. If you tried to access you wiki through a custom domain, you could see an error like this one:

This is because your browser requested content for a custom domain (e.g. example.com), but the request was received by web servers handling the .wikidot.com domain.

Definitely not something you want your visitors to see. In order to solve this you would need a certificate for your own domain. You could buy it from a number of companies and we could install it. Until recently however we had to charge an extra yearly fee for creating and maintaining an extra endpoint for your wiki. We actually had to rent an extra IP address and install your certificate on a web server associated with this new IP address. Not only it required extra work on our end, but the growing number of certificates made the infrastructure difficult to maintain.

Last November we upgraded our webserver infrastructure. We unified some of the endpoints and started using the SNI (Server Name Identification) to handle multiple SSL certificates by single endpoints.

SNI enables our web endpoints to handle multiple SSL certificates we need for Wikidot to work. What's more we can now use SNI to serve our clients' certificates from the very same endpoints! Adding extra certificates for custom domains no longer requires huge amount of work and can be easily completed within minutes.

Last month we were able to install first customer certificate and it works great so far.

So if you have or want to have a Pro+ account, want a secure wiki with a custom domain, we can install your SSL certificate free of charge. Just contact us at moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus, we will help you with the process!

The awesome LEGO figure and image courtesy of Pascal from Flickr.