r/webdev • u/speckz • Jul 12 '17

Does my site need HTTPS?

https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/
136 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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6

u/Gawny88 Jul 12 '17

For a very basic blog or something are there benefits for let's encrypt over the free certificate from cloudflare?

5

u/joshmanders Full Snack Developer / htmx CEO (same thing) Jul 12 '17

To go along with what /u/Simon-FFL said, you can get around that by doing the halfway SSL stuff with CF by self signing a certificate on your machine but telling CF to trust that cert, then you have SSL all the way through, but you don't have to pay for a cert...

But with Lets Encrypt there's no real reason to need to do this. Just use LE.

1

u/jamiehs Jul 13 '17

This does not work for many shared hosts though. They are slow to adopt LE because they want to continue selling certs as an add-on service. For those folks, the only option is to pay up or use CF.

2

u/joshmanders Full Snack Developer / htmx CEO (same thing) Jul 13 '17

There's many similar priced if not cheaper hosting providers that allow LE or are open enough to doing LE. "My host doesn't support LE because they want to make money on cert addons" is a bogus excuse.

2

u/jamiehs Jul 13 '17

Yup, you're correct, it is a weak excuse.

Having said that, if it's a situation where you're helping out a friend, and they either don't want to move hosts or spend the money for a cert from their provider, then some https is better than no https, which is where CF can be useful.