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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

It may not be an option for you, but you could consider using a free proxy service such as Cloudflare.

With the caveat that while the password will be encrypted from the browser to Cloudflare, it will still be transmitted as plain text from Cloudflare to your own server if your server doesn't support HTTPS.

So it's an improvement but not entirely a fix.

Actually, Cloudflare offer you certs they sign (which wouldn't be trusted by others, but they verify), that you can use to encrypt from the server to them. You still have to trust Cloudflare, but it's not plain text from cloudflare to your server.

If you mean the case where you literally can't serve under HTTPS, it's not just getting the cert that is the problem, in most cases running a local proxy of something that will would fix it, although I accept there are cases (cheap shared hosting, I guess) where that's not an option.

Wouldn't he still have to install the Cloudflare certs on his server then? In that case why not get LetsEncrypt?

In some cases you have the ability to add certs, but not to run the LetsEncrypt software (e.g: shared hosting) - with the short expiry date on LetsEncrypt certs, doing it manually is error-prone.

Which is not really a true https, depends on your view, but the flexible plan is not encrypted to the source server as one might expect. But if it's possible to set up things that way, it is https, i guess.

Seconding this, because this is what I do for one of my projects.

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