SSL wildcard issue for wp multisite subdomains

I have a problem with wildcard SSL and my host says they are unable to get it to work how I thought it would work.

I have bought a wildcard SSL certificate thinking that it should work nicely with subdomains on a wordpress multisite, but it doesn’t. Every time a sub-domain is created I have to contact my host so they can setup a symlink for each subdomain. Any sub-domain where my host hasn’t setup a symlinks, the sub-domains will display a 500 internal error whenever https is used. This surely can’t be right.

I can’t contact my host each time a new site is created on my multisite because anyone can create a site on my multisite, and many could create sites in one day. I have told them this but they say there isn’t anything they can do except for creating symlinks for each subdomain.

So how do other popular wordpress multisites work well with https such as at wordpress.com?

But all subdomains on my hosted multisite display an internal error if https is used, unless my host creates symlinks for each new subdomain.

Is this a server problem. Does anyone have a solution for this? Would another host be able to make https work on subdomains without them having to manually create symlinks for each sub-domain ?

Any help appreciated.

my name is Daniel Kanchev and I work for SiteGround as a Senior Web Apps Engineer.

The described issue is pretty strange and I just configured a test WordPress Network on one SiteGround shared server. I did not face any similar issues and I used sub-domain names with a wildcard SSL certificate. Usually such issues are caused by Apache VHost misconfiguration problems. People often use the following setup (the default cPanel setup):

<VirtualHost 109.73.236.14:443>
    ServerName *.lumenco.ca
    ServerAlias *.lumenco.ca
    VirtualDocumentRoot /home/lumenco0/public_html/%1
    ServerAdmin webmaster@lumenco.ca
    UseCanonicalName Off

The problem is usually caused by the fact that both ServerName and UseCanonicalName are not properly set. The correct configuration that works with WordPress is:

<VirtualHost 109.73.236.14:443>
    ServerName lumenco.ca
    ServerAlias *.lumenco.ca
    VirtualDocumentRoot /home/lumenco0/public_html/%1
    ServerAdmin webmaster@lumenco.ca
    UseCanonicalName On

@Rarst, the issue is strange but this is something that is supported on shared servers and I’ve personally configured many WordPress apps on our shared hosting plans to use the same setup 🙂