What a week in the world of IT is was for this guy! I should have known it was going to be a challenging one when last Sunday afternoon I decided to enable SSL on this WP site, and on Tuesday I was still holding my breath about the pending verification of the certificate. Lord have mercy on those less IT savvy who have to navigate these waters!
Consider this post an IT guy’s attempt at a light interlude from the more sobering subject of “church.” A brief switch from scaring the hell of out you to scaring the SSL out of you 🙂 Actually, I hope you won’t avoid implementing SSL for your website if you have one because of my tale of woe.
What brought me to implement SSL on this website last Sunday? It was my observations when a friend pulled up my blog site on their smartphone. The browser had issues loading the page because it wasn’t secure. You’ve no doubt experienced the browser warning you a site is not secure and not to proceed, but offering the somewhat obscured selection to proceed anyway and suffer the consequences of your poor choice 🙂 So, I thought of all the thousands of readers experiencing the same thing on my blogsite (wipe your screen here if the sarcasm has blurred your view) and decided to do something about it.
The easy part was shelling out the $16 or so to purchase a 2yr SSL certificate. Done in 5 minutes. Awesome! I’m on my way to a secure site. I’m thinking 20 minutes more and I’m sipping a beer watching a ball game relaxing in knowing my site is finally secure. I was living the dream.
Wake up Kevin!!! Welcome to the nightmare of being stuck in SSL implementation hell. It’s a cyber blackhole where your time and energy is drawn into a black void and your sense of direction is gone. You try one thing then another. You wait several minutes to see if perhaps that little modification you made seeps out into the DNS server multiverse and solves all your website woes. And you wait some more. Nothing. Did anybody hear me out there? You read that changes like these can take 24-48 hours, but you’ve seen changes like these take a few hours.
Monday morning rolls into late afternoon and my SSL certificate status is still pending. I can’t wait anymore, something is wrong. I chat online with tech support and they point out an appended section of text in the DNS record I added and instruct me to remove it to solve the problem. Whew! Thanks for the help! I change it. A day later it is still pending. I want to scream, a rebel SSL (shout out to Billy Idol here!). I remind myself 24-48 hours. I keep waiting. A few hours later I check one more time before contacting support and venting my frustration, and presto! My certificate status is validated and SSL is active on my blogsite!
Holy SSL Batman! It really shouldn’t be this difficult! Stay safe and patient out there my cyber friends.