Decommissioning of legacy redirect servers

At Finalsite, we're continuously working to enhance the security, performance, and reliability of your website services. As part of this commitment, we're decommissioning our legacy courtesy redirect servers on July 31st 2025. This change will affect approximately 600 clients who are currently using this older service.

What's happening and why?

For some time, we've provided a simple redirect service that automatically adds "www" to incoming website requests (e.g., if someone types yourdomain.org, they are redirected to www.yourdomain.org). This service is currently running out of a legacy datacenter in Massachusetts, USA.

While these servers only perform a basic redirect and don't host your website content, they are not protected by the same advanced security and oversight as our main production environment in Google Cloud, behind Cloudflare. Crucially, the legacy redirect service has never been able to support HTTPS (secure) connections.

By moving this redirect service to our Cloudflare infrastructure, we can ensure it's fully secured with HTTPS, provides better performance, and is maintained within our modern, robust environment.

What do you need to do?

If your website is impacted, we will be reaching out to your site administrators via a Support ticket. This ticket will include specific information about the hostnames you manage that are currently pointed to our legacy redirect IP addresses.

Your primary action will be to update the DNS records for these hostnames. You'll need to change the current IP address to a new one on our Cloudflare network, specifically 104.17.71.73. Don't worry, the redirect service will continue to function exactly as it does now, but with the added benefits of HTTPS security and enhanced reliability.

Example of a DNS change:

Let's say your website's redirect hostname is finalsitehighschool.org. Currently, when a user types finalsitehighschool.org into their browser, they are redirected to www.finalsitehighschool.org. However, if they try to access https://finalsitehighschool.org, they would see a browser error because the legacy service doesn't support HTTPS.

To make the necessary change, the administrator of finalsitehighschool.org will need to log in to their DNS service (where your domain records are managed) and edit the existing DNS record.

Here's how a typical record might look before the change:

• Host: @ or finalsitehighschool.org
• TTL: 3600 (This is the "Time To Live," indicating how long the value is cached by DNS resolvers, in this case, 1 hour)
• Value or IP: 50.56.64.4 (This is one of our legacy redirect IPs)

You will need to edit this record to point to our new Cloudflare IP: 104.17.71.73.

Important Note for Internal Networks: If your school or organization uses internal DNS records for its network, you must also update these internal records to match the new public DNS configuration. This ensures that users within your network experience seamless redirects.

What to expect during the transition

After you make the DNS changes, it will take some time for the updates to spread across the internet. This timeframe is largely determined by the TTL (Time To Live) set on your DNS record. For example, if your TTL is 3600 seconds (1 hour), it could take up to an hour for the change to fully propagate.

During this propagation period, some users might still hit the old redirect service, while others might temporarily encounter an error message before the new service becomes active. It's important to note that this temporary unavailability will only affect the redirect hostname (e.g., yourdomain.org), NOT the hostname used for your actual website content (e.g., www.yourdomain.org). No content is served from these redirect servers, so access to your website's content will not be affected.

Once the new redirect service is fully activated, all users should be successfully redirected, and the service will be secured over HTTPS.

We understand that DNS changes can sometimes feel complex. Please keep an eye on your Support tickets for specific instructions regarding your hostnames. Our Support team will be available to assist you throughout this process.

Thank you for your cooperation as we work to continually improve your Finalsite experience.