Thank you for the suggestion, Norman. We currently offer the option to manually install a certificate, but we feel the need to automate this process with commercial providers to improve the upselling workflow. However, this is not a small or simple feature that can be added quickly, so we may need some time to implement it.
As for ClouDNS, we would need additional client requests for it to become a priority. Good thing is that it is much easier for us to add another DNS provider
Of course i get your point, and hopefully there are others using cloudns.
Our aim as a company is to use only european infrastructure providers for our services, so clouddns is one of the bigger players in europe (aswell as bunny cdn that would be a good add to panelalpha also :)).
Hello Konrad,
as you pointed out that the manual installation of commercial certificates is already implemented: This is not possible in “Plans Configuration” for Quick Onboarding.
Our usecase would be a using a definded Subdomain of our brand domains to deploy a first staging instance for the customer. In this process there is (i might miss something out) no option to choose from any certificates. Adding one of our wildcard certificates would speed up the whole process.
Just that I understand - you want to provide subdomains for your customers and use your own wildcard SSL instead of Let’s Encrypt? How should “provisioning” of that certificate work? A step by step instructions of what should happen on the server would be helpful here for us
In the section Configuration > Plans > Premium, you offer the option for using a custom domain for subdomains. At this point, you could add an option to roll out a defined wildcard certificate along with the deployment. Of course, I don’t know your system in detail, but essentially the certificate would just need to be provided to the web server at this point, instead of initiating an LE (Let’s Encrypt) process. The certificate would then need to be entered into the Apache’s virtual host; this is currently done manually in the projects afterward.
Outside of PanelAlpha, we work with Ansible, where we have roles that, when a tag is specified, roll out the appropriate certificate from a repository directory for the desired domain (or subdomain). It is easy to switch between a certificate and an LE certificate using a simple tag.
Here, we are really only addressing the initial process of the “first rollout” via the master server. Once rolled out, and later changed by the customer to their own domain, it will probably be more difficult to implement a system that allows a return to the initial subdomain, unless the wildcard certificate remains on the WordPress instances. However, that probably won’t be necessary.
For the PanelAlpha Engine, the feature “Separate Container per Instance” is on the roadmap – perhaps it will be easier to handle this in the context of individual containers for the projects.
Thank you for the detailsed explanation. It really may be a useful functionality but will be not easy to implement so we may need time to add it to the system. We will keep this topic updated if there is any progress.