How an 8,000-domain registrar plugged the HTTPS-redirect gap that was costing it deals
Karan Arora | Head of Domain Portfolio at Digip
A domain registrar that runs on volume, accuracy and one checkbox it could not tick
Digip is a Stockholm-headquartered firm that manages domain portfolios and trademark services for business clients. Around eight thousand domains under management. Clients across aviation, hospitality, technology, and a long tail of mid-market companies that own bulk domain estates for either active websites or defensive registrations. The largest single client account holds more than fifteen hundred domains, mostly hotel websites across the European region. Karan Arora has run the domain portfolio department since 2022, working remotely from India for the Stockholm operation.
The business model is straightforward: take over the operational complexity of managing a domain estate so the client does not have to. Registration, DNS hosting, basic SSL certificates, HTTP redirects, email forwarding. Most of the work is invisible to the client until a domain breaks, at which point the value of having Digip becomes acutely visible. The reverse is also true. Anything Digip does not offer becomes a reason the client looks elsewhere.
When 'we can do everything except HTTPS redirects' became a sales blocker
Digip's underlying registrar partner, a large infrastructure provider with more than thirty million domains under management, offers most of the technical primitives Digip needs. Redirects are one of them, but only HTTP. When a user typed the HTTPS prefix explicitly, the certificate would not match and the redirect would fail with a browser warning. For domains that were not security-critical, that limitation could be lived with. For an increasing share of Digip's clients, it could not.
The pressure came from two directions at once. Existing clients started raising HTTPS redirect requirements as part of their annual portfolio reviews. The hospitality client with fifteen hundred domains, for example, had hotel websites where the certificate had to match because campaign URLs were getting shared on social media and through partner channels. A 'not secure' warning on a hotel's redirect URL was a brand problem. The second direction was sales. Karan's team noticed that new prospects increasingly arrived with a checklist for the procurement conversation. SSL certificate provision, yes. HTTP redirects, yes. HTTPS redirects with valid certificates, ... and that is where Digip had to say no.
The internal response was to ask the registrar partner whether HTTPS redirects were on their roadmap. The answer was that they had no plans to build it. That foreclosed the build-internally path, because building registry-grade HTTPS redirect infrastructure for an eight-thousand-domain portfolio at the resource level of a domain firm was not realistic. The remaining path was to find an external vendor who already did this well and layer it into the offering.
A short evaluation, a single winning criterion, and a vendor who picked up the phone
The search itself was a Google query for HTTPS redirect providers, conducted by Karan in summer 2023. A handful of vendors surfaced. He compared the candidates on pricing, software quality, and the depth of the analytics dashboard. redirect.pizza came out ahead on the combined criterion. The decisive moment was a discovery call with Michel from the redirect.pizza team, where pricing structure and the trial path through their platform plans were laid out.
The first plan Digip subscribed to was the Basic tier. Pro followed once Karan validated that the redirects ran at acceptable uptime through a two-week observational test. The test was specifically a downtime test: Karan placed five client-critical redirects on the platform and watched for any 404, any certificate-validation error, any latency spike. None occurred. The redirects ran clean. From that point forward, the business relationship has grown to the current state, with Digip on the Pro plan and a clear upgrade path to higher tiers as the volume justifies.
What the evaluation was not is also worth naming. Digip did not benchmark against a long list of vendors. The product matched the specification well enough on first encounter that a longer comparison was not warranted. The Stockholm IT and product team did not require a security audit or a vendor questionnaire at the plan size in question. Karan was empowered to decide and decided.
redirect.pizza is the ultimate tool for enterprise providers that are struggling with managing the certificate for a secure redirect. Fast, secure, and able to handle your requirements easily, rather than building your own software.
How the integration actually works inside a domain firm's workflow
Inside Digip's operational stack, redirect.pizza sits as a transparent external service. When a new client is onboarded, the domain transfer process surfaces the existing DNS configuration. If the client is using HTTPS redirects elsewhere, that pattern is replicated into redirect.pizza. If the client is currently on basic HTTP redirects, Karan's team flags the critical domains in the portfolio and proposes upgrading them to HTTPS via redirect.pizza as a paid add-on.
The integration is not white-labelled. Digip communicates openly to clients that this layer is provided by an external partner. The IP and CNAME values that surface in DNS records point publicly to redirect.pizza's infrastructure. Karan's view is that this is the right level of transparency for the current scale. Once Digip reaches a volume tier where dedicated IPs become commercially viable, the picture changes. For now, the openness costs Digip nothing and saves the trust capital that a clumsy white-label attempt would erode.
Pricing is also straightforward. The cost from redirect.pizza is passed through to the client with a margin on top. Clients understand they are paying for an external service. The transparency carries through the entire chain.
What two and a half years of partnership has actually produced
Three signals matter. The first is operational: zero downtime incidents that triggered a client ticket in the last two years. For a service whose entire job is to not be down, that is the ceiling of what the metric can show. Karan keeps the trust by being able to say in every annual review that the critical redirects have not failed once. About eighteen million traffic events ran through Digip's redirect.pizza setup in the last year alone, with a daily average of thousands of users hitting redirected URLs. None of them encountered a broken redirect.
The second signal is commercial. The HTTPS-redirect checkbox now gets ticked in every new-client checklist conversation. Whether or not the prospect immediately needs HTTPS redirects, the capability is on the offer sheet. Karan's team has used that completeness as a retention argument in existing-client reviews and as a closing argument in new-prospect meetings. The product is not the deal, but its absence was costing deals.
The third signal is the one that took Karan by surprise. The analytics dashboard inside redirect.pizza provides per-country traffic breakdowns and a split between HTTPS redirect traffic and the residual HTTP traffic on legacy domains. In annual reviews, Karan exports those analytics as PDFs and screenshots and walks the client through what their defensive domain registrations are actually earning them in traffic. The framing converts: clients who were keeping URLs alive as defensive cost lines start to see them as recoverable traffic sources, and the conversation moves from 'why am I paying for this domain' to 'how do we get more domains into the HTTPS layer'. Karan estimates that without those analytics, fifty to sixty percent of the upsell conversations he runs annually would not land the same way.
The analytics give us a clear picture of where the traffic is coming from, country by country, and split between HTTPS and HTTP. That data goes to the client in PDF. Without that visibility, fifty or sixty percent of our retention conversations would not land the same way.
What this case says about how registrars should think about HTTPS infrastructure
The pattern Digip walked through is one that any domain firm at or above the four-thousand-domain mark will eventually face. Defensive registrations and brand-protective domain estates rarely have active websites attached. HTTP redirects are good enough for many of them, but the percentage that need HTTPS is rising every year as the rest of the web moves to HTTPS-by-default. The question is not whether the registrar will need to provide HTTPS redirects, but whether they will build, buy, or refer.
Build, at Digip's scale, was not feasible. Refer was costing deals. Buy was the right answer, and the constraint was finding a vendor whose platform met the criteria for uptime, pricing transparency, and the analytics depth that a B2B-reseller business model requires. Karan's recommendation now, two and a half years in, is unambiguous. For any provider of bulk domain services who is currently telling clients to set up their own HTTPS redirects through MS 365 or Cloudflare, the build-versus-buy math is straightforward and redirect.pizza handles the specifics.
There is one structural caveat. The relationship works because redirect.pizza is a single-purpose tool. Were it to broaden its product surface to compete with full-stack platforms, the simplicity that makes it integrable into Digip's stack would erode. The depth of the analytics is welcome. The narrowness of the core proposition is what makes the rest of the proposition possible.
