A brief overview
Yola offers White Label partners two hosting options: syndicated and non-syndicated. Let’s take a look at each of these options and how they affect the ability to add SSL on customers’ sites.
Syndicated hosting
White Label partners who choose to host their customers' sites with Yola can enable our Cloudflare Universal SSL implementation.
What is Universal SSL
Universal SSL is an SSL certificate that requires proxying traffic through Cloudflare in order to provide the certificate. Note that Universal SSL is only used to encrypt traffic between a site visitor and Cloudflare and doesn’t encrypt traffic between Cloudflare and the origin web server. Encrypting traffic helps prevent data theft which is a critical step toward building a safer, better Internet. With Universal SSL you will never need to worry about SSL certificates expiring or steps to take to stay up to date with the latest SSL vulnerabilities.
Note: SSL is a hard requirement for all Latitude sites.
How to proceed
If you want to continue with the syndicated hosting option, our dedicated White Label support team can assist with the information required to achieve this. The process simply requires the addition of a few DNS records which, once in place, allow CloudFlare to verify the domain and generate a valid SSL certificate. This article explains how to configure DNS records to support Yola Hosted SSL.
From our experience, this usually takes just a few minutes, although a waiting time of 24 hours is recommended to allow for the global propagation of the DNS changes.
Non-syndicated hosting
White Label partners who choose to host their own customers' sites and publish via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) must enable SSL independently. Yola cannot assist with the addition of SSL on non-syndicated partner sites, which means partners are solely responsible for the generation and verification of the necessary SSL certificates.
Additionally, customers of non-syndicated partners will not see the SSL options on the Publish tab within the Sitebuilder.
Adding Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) on third-party or pointed domains
If a customer's domain is managed by a third-party registrar and is merely pointing to a White Label partner, Yola is unable to add SSL to the associated customer site. Ideally, customers should ask their registrar to add the necessary DNS records to their pointed domain. Again, our dedicated White Label support team can assist with the information required to achieve this.