Is it better to have a sub domain and associate that with the SSL or will a folder do?
What’s the best practice in doing this? Do you have a vendor you recommend?
Main Site, Subdomain or Subfolder?
There is not a best practice as such – it is whatever makes most sense to your business.
Location Considerations
For example, we have a around half a dozen brands, and our limited company is Purple Parasol Ltd. We have our payment gateway at payments.purpleparasol.com on a server in the USA and www.purpleparasol.com on a server in the UK. The subdomain approach made it easier to host the subdomain in a different physical location from the main site. Our billing system is at Infusionsoft in the USA so hosting the payment gateway in the United States makes sense in terms of performance and availability.
Branding The Site
Having a separate WordPress installation makes it easier if you want to implement “Order Confirmation Pages” and want to style each Order Confirmation Page according to the brand. This typically just means having different image banners at the top of the page according to the product that is being bought. Having a separate installation means you can choose a WordPress theme that makes it easy to style individual pages differently.
Managing Complexity
A separate WordPress installation also removes the potential issues of plugin conflicts. For example, working with a client on an installation just last night I discovered that the Lead Pages Connector plugin “steals” the home page before SubscriptionBoss can process any order form sent by Infusionsoft.
Right now you cannot use a Lead Pages landing page as the home page and use SubscriptionBoss together out of the box. It is necessary to add a few lines in the .htaccess file to allow SubscriptionBoss to operate on another URL by adding a RewriteRule such that a URL such as http://www.yoursite.com/?subb_action=submit&subscription=gold gets handled at http://www.yoursite.com/subb-handler?subb_action=submit&subscription=gold and hence does not bump into the Lead Pages connector processing.
Rule Of Thumb
So the broad rule of thumb as follows:
Install the plugin on your main site if you have a single brand and don’t have dozens of other plugins running that are doing URL rewriting, and your site does not run painfully slowly. Otherwise, consider a subfolder or a subdomain. If you already have SSL on the main domain and have capacity on your server then there is no need to buy another SSL certificate, just use a subfolder.
A Note On Server Sizing
For most users, they do need a server that is available and hence reliable but not necessarily very fast.
However if you run webinars with hundreds or thousands of people all trying to buy at the same moment then you need to size the system accordingly due to the massive spikes in traffic
SSL Certificates
A SSL certificate is required to secure the transmission of the Infusionsoft form data to SubscriptionBoss. A NON self-signed SSL certificate must exist on the site where SubscriptionBoss is installed to avoid the user receiving browser warnings or having the SubscriptionBoss script blocked entirely
SSL certificates come in various shapes, sizes and costs. These include company wide certificates, wild card certificates and those that entitle you to add various kitemarks to the site.
The cheapest SSL certificate will suffice as far as SubscriptionBoss is concerned. Normally your existing host will set it up for you on request for between $50-$100 per year. Cheapest certificates you can purchase yourself are around $10 per year however your host will probably charge you $50 install it
It probably simplest asking you host to install the certificate for you providing you find their charges acceptable.
Leave a Reply