The Godfather of Internet Marketing – An offer you cannot refuse

Today has not been a great day so far .. but I wanted to pass along a word of caution along with a must see video if you are in the Internet Marketing niche.

First off is a word of warning… if you are thinking about using cloudflare.com cloud based load balancing system.

First the good: The service is free, and rather easy to setup. It’s well worth a look at if you get a lot of traffic and especially if you are hosted on a shared platform. They will offload and protect your site from “bad” traffic. For me this was important, as I get a lot of “bad” traffic (like forum spam, bad bots, etc) to a couple of my niche sites that were driving up my server costs.

Now the warning: They DON’T support SSL. So if you have an ecommerce site that needs SSL to, I dunno process orders?, then make sure you have your ssl setup already on a sub-domain. (aka ssl.mydomain.com). If it’s setup on the main: mydomain.com you WILL run into major issues.

Now as you may have guessed, I’ve ran smack dab into this issue.  I didn’t read the fine print (I mean who does?) and enabled one of my e-commerce sites over to Cloudflare’s DNS. Today I didn’t see any order action, so I checked on the checkout page .. and uh oh.  “The Request Cannot Be Completed” ..  Yeah that’s not a way to wakup in the morning.

And yes folks this gets worse ….

So after seeing that I couldn’t use Cloudflare for SSL access, I decided that I would just add a new subdomain (ssl.) and use my certificate on there. Of course that doesn’t work as the SSL cert is only tied to the “exact” domain. So ok, no problem since that wasn’t working anyway, I’ll just re-voke the SSL cert from GoDaddy (who I have the cert from), and re-install it on the new ssl.mydomain.com.

Well if anyone of you reading this have done this before, you’ll understand what a mistake this was. Once you revoke a SSL cert you cannot get it back. Thankfully GoDaddy did refund me the 2 years remaining that I had on the cert, but now I’m sitting with no SSL, no SSL cert and a wasted day (and not to mention lost revenue) ..

So what are the takeaways: Pay attention to small print — especially on live projects. IT/Tech stuff sucks .. And let it be known that I’m a tech guy. I maintain my own server and I write my own software, I can’t imagine if you don’t have at least some what of a tech background, what you would do.

The irony is, yesterday I watched my friend Andy Jenkins promo video of Kajabi. Which I recommend that you watch. If you are in the “launch” business or want to produce a membership site of some importance, then this is aimed directly at you. That’s not an affiliate link .. it’s just something that I think may be of interest to my readers. And heck after my day today, it’s of interest to me too.

Kajabi is a great new platform that takes care of the IT stuff so you don’t have to .. and it’s much more. Andy does a great job of covering it in his video, so I won’t attempt to one up him here.. just give it a look and as usually with AJ’s video’s it’s entertaining.