Using SSL to protect admin sessions

Hi there,

I was hoping someone might be able to help me with difficulties configuring WordPress so that SSL is enabled when logging into and accessing the admin interface.

First thing I did was to add define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true); to wp-config.

My service provider (Site5) has server-wide certs available for use, but you need to access using a different URL. Rather than the usual https://mysite.tld/, in order to access you need to use the URL https://servername.site5.com/~username/, which is supposed to bring you to the same place. So I tried the above with of course wp-admin/ added at the end, and got this error: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long

In order to diagnose things, I took the liberty of checking how this URL would work without enabling SSL, so I removed the line from wp-config requiring SSL then tried to access http://servername.site5.com/~username/wp-admin.

I was able to access the login page, but noticed that when it went to the login screen, the URL had changed to: http://mydomain.tld/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fservername.site5.com%2F~username%2Fwp-admin%2F&reauth=1

which I suspect would be why it’s causing an error when I try it using SSL – it redirects to mydomain.tld, which doesn’t work with the server-wide certificate, and so blows up.

Is there a way to prevent the redirect and enable login through the alternative URL, so that I can login to admin using SSL, or is this a hopeless endeavour?

Any suggestions or thoughts would be most appreciated.

Thanks.