How Digip plugged the HTTPS redirect gap that was costing it deals
Karan Arora | Head of Domain Portfolio at Digip
Digip manages domain portfolios and trademark services for business clients out of Stockholm, with around 8,000 domains under management. Its upstream registrar partner handled almost everything Digip needed. One exception kept surfacing in sales conversations and annual client reviews: HTTPS redirects with valid certificates.
Digip closed that gap with redirect.pizza. It now runs its client-critical redirects on the platform, hasn't logged a single downtime ticket in two years, and turns the redirect analytics into the strongest line in annual client reviews. "Without that visibility, fifty or sixty percent of our retention conversations wouldn't land the same way", says Head of Domain Portfolio Karan Arora.
At a glance
- Around 8,000 domains under management
- Largest single client: more than 1,500 domains
- On redirect.pizza since 2023, currently on the Pro plan
- Zero downtime incidents that triggered a client ticket in two years
- Around 18 million redirect events in the last year
The HTTPS redirect gap that was costing Digip deals
Digip's job is to take the operational complexity of a domain estate off the client's hands. Registration, DNS hosting, basic SSL certificates, HTTP redirects, email forwarding. Most of that work stays invisible until a domain breaks, which is exactly when Digip's value becomes obvious.
The missing piece was HTTPS redirects. Digip's upstream registrar partner offered redirects, but only over HTTP. When a visitor typed the HTTPS prefix, the certificate didn't match the redirect and the browser threw a security warning. For domains that weren't security sensitive, that was tolerable. For a growing share of Digip's clients, it wasn't. One hospitality client managed more than 1,500 hotel domains, where a "not secure" warning on a campaign URL would land in front of paying guests.
Build, buy, or refer
Digip asked its upstream partner whether HTTPS redirects were on the roadmap. The answer was no. That ruled out waiting. Building the capability in house wasn't realistic either, because running HTTPS redirect infrastructure for an estate of eight thousand domains, at the resources of a registrar Digip's size, wasn't a project worth taking on. That left one path: find a vendor that already did this well and add it to the offer.
Choosing a vendor on uptime, pricing, and analytics
Karan Arora, who has run Digip's domain portfolio department since 2022, started with a plain search for HTTPS redirect providers in the summer of 2023. A handful of vendors surfaced. He compared them on pricing, software quality, and the depth of the analytics dashboard. redirect.pizza came out ahead on the combination. A discovery call with Michel from the redirect.pizza team laid out the pricing structure and the trial path through the plans.
Digip started on the Basic plan and moved to Pro after a two-week test. The test was deliberately a downtime test. Karan put five client-critical redirects on the platform and watched for any 404, any certificate error, any latency spike. None of them broke, and Digip has been on Pro since.
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 redirect.pizza fits inside a registrar's workflow
redirect.pizza doesn't ask Digip to move hosting or change registrars. It works at the DNS layer, with automatic HTTPS SSL on every redirect, so Digip can layer it onto domains hosted anywhere.
When Digip onboards a client, the domain transfer surfaces the existing DNS setup. If the client already uses HTTPS redirects, Digip replicates that pattern in redirect.pizza. If the client is on plain HTTP redirects, Karan's team flags the critical domains and proposes upgrading them to HTTPS as a paid add-on.
The setup isn't white-labeled, and that's a deliberate choice. Digip tells clients openly that this layer comes from an external partner. The cost is passed through to the client with a margin, and clients understand they are paying for an external service. Digip's view is that naming the external partner openly builds more trust than a clumsy white-label attempt would.
Zero downtime, and a new client-review angle
The first result is operational. In two years, no downtime incident has triggered a client ticket. It lets Karan tell every annual review that the critical redirects haven't failed once. Around 18 million redirect events ran through Digip's setup in the last year, with thousands of users a day landing on redirected URLs, and none of them hit a broken redirect. Those redirects run on redirect.pizza's global edge network.
The second is commercial. The HTTPS redirect line now gets ticked in every new client conversation. Even when a prospect doesn't need it on day one, the capability is on the offer sheet. Its absence used to cost deals.
The third caught Karan off guard. The analytics break traffic down by country and split HTTPS redirect traffic from the residual HTTP traffic on legacy domains. In annual reviews, Karan exports those analytics. He walks clients through what their defensive registrations are actually earning in traffic. Clients who treated old domains as a defensive cost line start to see them as recoverable traffic, and the question shifts from why they are paying for a domain to how they get more domains into the HTTPS layer.
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 wouldn't land the same way.
The HTTPS question doesn't go away for registrars
The path Digip walked is one most registrars hit eventually. Defensive registrations and brand-protection estates often have no active website attached, and HTTP redirects are fine for many of them. But the share that needs HTTPS climbs every year as the rest of the web moves to HTTPS by default. The question isn't whether a registrar will need to offer HTTPS redirects.
It's whether they build, buy, or refer.
At Digip's scale, building wasn't feasible and referring was costing deals. Buying was the answer, and the constraint was finding a platform that met the bar on uptime, pricing transparency, and the analytics Digip needed to keep client reviews sharp.
The relationship works because redirect.pizza does one thing. If it broadened into a full-stack platform, the fit with Digip's workflow would erode.
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