If you’ve purchased a Lifeboat for your HappyPress subscription, then there are a few considerations.
Your Lifeboat will need to live at a new domain. These can be sub-domains, and we typically suggest something like static.yourwebsite.com or www2.yourwebsite.com
It is advantageous to give us control over this new domain. This will allow us to create and update the SSL certificate for your Lifeboat.
For customers that host their DNS records with HappyPress, we’ll be able to run automated health checks against your website. Should the health check fail, we will be able to re-route users to your Lifeboat automatically.
If you’re unable to let us handle your DNS, then you can always point your new subdomain at your Lifeboat. Contact us to find out more details.
Next steps
If you’re hosting your DNS with us, it’s really simple. Pick a subdomain for your Lifeboat and let us know. We’ll set it up, with an automatically renewing SSL certificate and automatic failover based on your websites health. This means that switching over to the Lifeboat is near instant.
If you can’t host your websites DNS with us, but you can host the subdomain DNS records with us, we’ll have less control, but we can still handle some of it for you. We’ll be able to generate automatically renewing SSL certificates for your lifeboat, but you will be in control of when the Lifeboat is used. You should create a way to re-route your visitors in the event of an emergency. In most cases this will mean you changing the DNS entry for your website manually. As DNS propagation can take hours, you should be aware that your Lifeboat is at the mercy of your DNS propagation time.
If you can’t host any of your DNS with us, then not only will you be in control of failing over to the Lifeboat, but you’ll also need to generate an SSL certificate for yoru Lifeboat, and provide us with the certificate body, certificate private key and certificate chain. You’ll be responsible for sending this to us at least one month in advance of the certificate renewal.