Transferring in
Enabling secure, https hosting for your Mythic Beasts site is quick and easy, but in order to do it, we must already be hosting the http version of your site. This creates a problem if you're trying to transfer an existing https site to Mythic Beasts without service interruption.
It is possible to get the certificate for your site issued, and https hosting enabled before transferring your site to us, but it's not entirely straightforward.
1. Enable hosting for your site on your hosting account
Firstly, make sure that your Mythic Beasts hosting account is configured to host your website. To do this:
- Log in to the customer control panel
- Click on "hosting and shell accounts"
- Select the hosting account you want to use
- Hit "Add domains or sub-domains" and follow the instructions to add your domain
Do not change the DNS settings for your domain yet to point at Mythic Beasts.
2. Redirect challenge requests
In order to obtain a certificate for your site, we need to response to specific, automated web requests that are sent to your site. If your site is not hosted with us, we can only do that if the necessary requests are redirected to us. To do this, you need to have your existing hosting provider redirect all requests starting with:
http://yourdomain/.well-known/acme-challenge/
to:
http://yourdomain.hosting-server.mythic-beasts.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/
Where hosting-server is the name of the server that your account is on, e.g. yali, onza, lynx. So, if your site is www.example.com and you are hosted on yali, redirect requests to:
http://www.example.com.yali.mythic-beasts.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/
The exact process for doing this will depend on your provider, but you may be able to do it by creating a file called .htaccess in the root of your webspace, with the following contents:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^\.well-known/acme-challenge/(.*) http://www.example.com.yali.mythic-beasts.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/$1 [L,R]
3. Enable secure hosting
You should now be able to enable https hosting for your site, by following the normal instructions.
4. Checking that it worked
As your site isn't yet hosted with Mythic Beasts, you can't simply browse to your website to check that the certificate was issued correctly. To test the site, you will need to create a "hosts file" entry that makes your computer send requests for your site to your Mythic Beasts account, rather than your current provider.
You can find instructions for how to do this for your site using the test link at the bottom of the web settings page for your site in the control panel.