My subdomains forward to another website

[loudsnail]

What is the name of the domain?

Prescription Potatoes

What is the error message?

First Evangelical Lutheran Church

What is the issue you’re encountering

my subdomains go to a completely different website if accessed via httpS instead of http

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I tried looking up what seemed to be the problem and changing settings accordingly, including changing ssl/tls encryption to “strict” as indicated My website's subdomain isn't working - #5 by user784 which i just realized made even my non-sub domain refuse to show up, though without weird forwarding. I also tried setting a “rule” to automatically forward the subdomain, but that probably can’t actually do anything if the subdomain is never accessed to begin with. Additionally i tried switching the sub domains from “dns only” to “proxied” but initially didn’t see that it changed anything, and while i was scrambling trying to figure out what broke the main site, before i realized it was strict encryption, i set those back to dns only.
the whole security certificate business totally confounds me. according to the technical support from my web-host, asmallorange,
“If there is no SSL certificate for the website and if you try to access the domain with HTTPS and bypass the security warning, then it will fetch the first domain on the IP for which the SSL is installed or loads with 404 error message. Hence, you need to access the domains without HTTPS and it should work.”
and then it tried to sell me security certificates like it did a few years ago, which is what sent me to cloudflare in the first place. The first ten maybe years I used that host i didn’t NEED a security certificate and i resented them trying to convince me i suddenly owe them several hundred dollars extra per year, and now again. I would rather just not use subdomains if it came to that choice.
in fact i don’t believe this problem is new, nor my inability to fix it, and i merely resolved to only use http links, and then i FORGOT this happened, but increasingly other websites will force the link to have an S in it and the problem lives again.

What feature, service or problem is this related to?

I don’t know

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

http://ope.bimshwel.com should forward to bimshwel com/ope. stupidly simple!
https://ope.bimshwel.com will either generate a threatening “warning” page that makes it seem like i’m selling dead bodies on my website or go wherever it feels like, which presently is the website for some church in tennessee. I am not entirely decided on which of those outcomes is worse.

Screenshot of the error

[i40west]

What your host told you is right: they don’t have your subdomain set up for HTTPS, so they haven’t configured their server to answer to it with HTTPS, so it returns some other site they host instead. This is obviously stupid, and is meant to force you to pay them for a certificate, which is a ripoff.

But, you don’t have to do that, to make this work. You can indeed do it with a Redirect Rule at Cloudflare. The request never has to reach your host on that hostname at all.

First, create the hostname (subdomain) at Cloudflare. You’ve already done this, but make it proxied. This makes the request go to Cloudflare first.

Create a Redirect Rule. (Give it a name.) Choose “Custom Expression” and create an expression that matches your subdomain. Select “hostname”, “equals”, and type in ope.bimshwel.com. Then put in a “static” redirect to https://bimshwel.com/ope/. It will look like this:

Deploy the rule. Now the requests are going to Cloudflare, and never going to your host at all until they get redirected to your main domain, which works fine with HTTPS. So it should work the way you want.

[loudsnail]

ah i think that does it! or so far it seems to, after i delete the correct cookies. Thank you! This even ALMOST makes sense to me.