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Managing HTTP to HTTPS at a dental office
25 Aug 2026
How a dental office deals with HTTP to HTTPS — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a certificate that expires on a Sunday. The certificate chain breaks for a dental office.
Early on we tried to automate HTTP to HTTPS for a dental office with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.
For a dental office, the boring path won: HTTPS, a backup that we have restored once on purpose, and a calendar reminder for HTTP to HTTPS.
A friend of the owner at a dental office had set up HTTP to HTTPS years ago. When we audited, the config still pointed at a server they stopped paying for in 2024.
Fixing HTTP to HTTPS cost less than the lunch meeting where a dental office decided to wait another quarter. Waiting is never free.
DNS propagation is not instant, but it is not magic either. We explained to a dental office that the TTL on the old HTTP to HTTPS record was 86 400 seconds — twenty-four hours.
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