How do I do a 301 redirect from https to https?

Question

My company changed names recently, so along with that came a new domain. Both the old site and the new site are HTTPS and are on the same server using separate DNS entries.

I setup a 301 redirect which works great if people go to oldsite.com, but if they go to https://oldsite.com they get an SSL error.

Is there any way around this? Hopefully through DNS, server config, or htaccess file.

Answer 1

With TLS/SSL, only one certificate can be presented by the server per IP address. So if oldsite.com is using the same IP as newsite.com, the certificate for https://newsite.com will be the one sent to the client, which will (by definition) raise an SSL error for https://oldsite.com .

To have both oldsite.com and newsite.com both active, you'll have to have separate IPs for each. These can reside on the same server, with some (possibly complicated) routing configuration depending on your server's OS, to ensure requests to each IP are replied to from the same IP. However, even with DNS entries for both, you cannot share an IP address with multiple HTTPS domains.

Edit: You could also use virtual domains (exact config dependent on which web server you're running) to present the certificate for oldsite.com, then send the redirect after the TLS session is in place. I'd have to know which web server you're using (Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, etc) to give a config example, though.