Shiny Lock

Good news, everyone!

Professor-Farnsworth

This site now has SSL/TLS (aka “secure hosting”)! Visit the site using https to see the totally awesome lock icon (or whatever other icon your browser decides to use). And even better, I didn’t need to spend any money to do this! I probably wouldn’t have bothered to set it up if it wasn’t free because let’s face it, there isn’t really anything of value on this site anyway. But when the price tag is $0, there’s no reason not to set it up.

In most SSL/TLS setups, there are two things that web hosts will usually charge for on top of normal hosting fees:

  1. A unique IP address for the site
  2. A “professional” or “trusted” SSL certificate

I should probably also give a disclaimer here. I work for DreamHost (the host for this site), so it would be possible for me to get these things for free. However I do try to make it a point to not abuse my employee powers needlessly. IPv4 addresses these days are somewhat valuable due to scarcity, and the “professional” certificates that DreamHost offers to customers are actually bought from Comodo.

Now you’re probably wondering, “if those things usually cost money, how did you set this up for free?” First, SNI eliminates the requirement for having a unique IP address. Luckily for me, DreamHost added support for SNI a few weeks ago. Second, I learned about StartSSL in this blog post. StartSSL, unlike most (if not all) other trusted certificate authorities, will sign SSL certificates (at their lowest tier) for free. What a deal!

Anyway, thats all I have for now. Stay secure, my friends.

Finally

Now that I finally have this domain, I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with it.  I may use this for testing or development of various projects… or this may be just another uninteresting blog that nobody ever reads anyway.