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I own a website (gosportweather.co.uk) which is hosted by the same company as other websites on a shared server. The problem is I am noticing that these other websites appear to be showing my webpages under their domain names. At first I thought someone had copied my pages however running the domains through whois shows them all as being on the same ip with the same name servers as my site and so I can't help but wonder if my host has got something wrong at their end.

When attempting to visit the sites chrome gives the following warning:

NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

This server could not prove that it is www.example.com; its security certificate is from www.gosportweather.co.uk. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.

I have changed the domain in the error above from the original to example.com in case it is a legit site as I don't want to damage their reputation.

The certificates all appear to have expired but I am confused as to why the error is occurring.

I have noticed that when I update my webpage the pages under the other domains also update.

My host recent acquired the servers from another company and so I wonder if they have misconfigured them. I have been having DNS issues with error: err_name_not_resolved on multiple networks and my host tried to fix this by updating the name servers about 24hrs ago but the site is still not being found on some networks.

Please could someone advise me on what I should do to fix this. What is likely to be causing these problems and are they connected?

Many Thanks,

Ross

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  • You'll run into stuff like this with shared hosting, particularly with HTTPS.
    – ceejayoz
    Dec 21, 2015 at 15:39

2 Answers 2

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This happens on shared hosting when someone tries to access a site with https and their site doesn't have a certificate configured. Someone goes to https://anothersite.com and https://yoursite.com loads instead because it's your certificate.

BTW, your certificate is expired.

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  • Does this mean that the content is still residing in my account on the server or has it been copied / transferred to the offending websites account. Dec 21, 2015 at 21:34
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I have seen this issue before on shared hosting when you request a site using HTTPS that shares your server and hence IP address.

I suspect the server software is misconfigured or does not support Server Name Indication (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication) properly.

It's fashionable these days for sites to support HTTPS and Google is among those proponents of HTTPS-everywhere so I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome was trying HTTPS of its own accord for all those other sites or at least hiding this from you in the UI. If you use HTTP to access your own/other sites you will likely not see this issue.

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