Will it make changes to my .htaccess file?

G’day painlessseo,

No changes are made to the system, it only makes changes to content on-the-fly. Deactivating the plugin stops it having any effect.

For your videos, did you mean that they do use HTTPS, or don’t use HTTPS? If they can’t be loaded over HTTPS, they will likely not work due to mixed content.

cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross, thank you very much for answering my questions.

Great to know and I’m glad it works on-the-fly and I will test your plugin on my site!

Regarding the video, if I visit the video file like https://media.domain.com/video.mp4 on the browser,
it shows the video but the warning sign indicates that the connection isn’t secured. In the HTML, I use src=”https…”, although I know it isn’t. Will your plugin work in this scenario?

Again, thank you.

It won’t have any impact on the plugin, but you might still get mixed content warnings. Please let me know what happens, I’m unsure what the current browsers do with this now.

cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross,

I tested it and as you predicted, it shows “Your connection to this site is not fully secure” namely the mixed content warning.

I learned that there are a few ways to install an SSL cert to a Google Cloud Storage’s bucket. Cloudflare, Google Cloud Balancer, just to name a couple.

However, I don’t plan to use Cloudflare for this domain and I heard that Google Cloud Balancer costs $18/month, which I wouldn’t consider only for hosting a few videos files.

If you have other suggestions, kindly share with me and others. Great plugin and I wish I could find a better use of it.

Jean

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by painlessseo.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by painlessseo.

Those are your best options, I believe. You probably don’t have to have Cloudflare proxy your main domain, but you will need to add it to their DNS so that you can manage the subdomain. If that’s a problem, then look at how you can purchase and load a TLS certificate for GCS. I imagine they have some doco on that.

cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross, thank you for your suggestions!

Not sure if this is the most updated doc but it seems that I wouldn’t be able to only add a subdomain like media.domain.com to Cloudflare: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-to-use-the-cloudflare-just-one-sub-domain-without-change-the-main-domain/323612
I’m not sure if I want to change my DNS at this moment…

I did a little research and I believe you would still need to use G’s Load Balancing and have to add a third-party cert there: https://cloud.google.com/certificate-manager/docs/overview & https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/ssl-certificates/google-managed-certs

The good news is that I still can use the default URL that comes with the HTTPS like https://storage.googleapis.com/bucketname/filename.mp4

But the downside is obvious and like everybody else, I wanted to keep the domain consistent for SEO purposes. Honestly, it should work but I’m not sure if G’s crawler would always treat this type of video “assets” as mine or even index it.

Still scratching my head…

Jean

Yes, you need to add your main domain to Cloudflare and let it manage your domain if you want to make use of its free TLS for subdomains. My point was that you could add your main domain with no proxy (i.e. traffic goes direct to your domain), but proxy your media domain.

Ultimately, the simplest solution for you with free TLS for your media subdomain might just be a separate domain, bought cheaply from Namecheap or similar. Subdomains a nicely free, but cost you in the end. Don’t ask me about sub-sub-domains and Cloudflare, nor how I know!

cheers,
Ross

Got it. Brilliant. I could add the same domain.com and allow the direct traffic go through.

I agree. A domainmedia.xyz will probably be easier. My only concern however is if G recognize this domain name as a “side domain” of the main domain.

Thank you Ross for the help! I really appreciate it.