Why doesn’t my Web Redirect work

We will occasionally receive a support inquiry stating that a web redirect is not working properly. While it is entirely possible that there is a back-end error that could be the culprit, it is extremely rare. So we would like to make another suggestion worth investigating first.

The most likely causes for web redirects that aren’t working are:

• The URL begins with https instead of http – Because web redirects are performed on our DNS infrastructure, they cannot accept the installation of a SSL certificate which is required for the URL to begin with https. So try your web redirect without https. Note: The destination, that is the location it sends the user to can start with https.
  
  
• Your browser is caching a prior https to http redirect – Browsers are notorious for caching (retaining memory of) http to https redirects. If the web redirect you created existed before and had content located at it that previously redirected from http to https, your browser is most likely remembering that and completely refusing to even see if http will work. Try flushing your cache, using incognito mode or an entirely different browser/machine instead. Note: There is no known way to force all browsers to clear this cache, so if customers or end-users have this stuck in their cache too, it’s a bit of a problem.
  
  
• You have internal DNS – Occasionally an organization runs split DNS, so if you do, you’ll most likely need to implement a DNS ‘A’ record for the same Web Redirect internally. Just ping it or perform a dig/nslookup externally to see what IP address we assigned to your redirect record. The IP address doesn’t change unless you delete and re-add the Web Redirect record, so it should last quite some time.
  
  

Often the best solution to sites that previously used HTTPS or where you want the Web Redirect to start with HTTPS (regardless of whether it existed before) will require the installation of a SSL Certificate. There is absolutely no way around this. And no, we don’t have a way of supporting this either, sorry.

We highly recommend a cost-effective approach to this by getting a low-cost Linux virtual machine (VM) at an organization like Digital Ocean or similar. There for $7/month or less you can have a Linux machine for your exclusive use. You can install the Apache web server and as many SSL certificates for as many URLs as you like. It doesn’t take much power to perform 301 or 302 redirects.

If you still encounter any issues with a redirect, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team. We’re more than happy to help troubleshoot.