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Comment by robbiewxyz | Hacker News Reader

I think you could probably just point your DNS at Cloudflare to proxy your site through them; their service includes SSL plus some extras like caching and such for free. I've used them for a handful of projects and it's worked great.

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That said it will still be insecure because of the unencrypted path from cloudflare to you server but it will hire the error

For some definitions of "insecure".

Hmmmm. -4. I fleshed out my thoughts in slightly more detail in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13458224

Cloudflare will provide you with certificates they generate, that they verify but won't be accepted by anyone else. (No cost because of that) - this keeps the data secure between you are them. Obviously, you are still trusitng cloudflare in the middle, but still less trust required.

If you can install a certificate, you can already get a real one from Lets Encrypt (you don't actually need to run their client on the server). The problem is that many shared hosting services are still stuck in the past, and don't let you use SSL/TLS at all.

Without running the client, that means manually changing the cert for expiry, which is very short on LetsEncrypt certs. That introudces the possibility of forgetting or messing it up.

I agree that the best option is for shared hosts just to build in support for LetsEncrypt.

Hmm, so let's say I'm hosting my static files on S3. I've currently got CloudFlare setup in front of it but that apparently doesn't help.

Anything I can do other than not using S3?

Use CloudFront? Took me about an hour to set up for my S3 based blog, free TLS, http/2 and IPv6 without any setup apart from a checkbox.

Right, so I've currently got CloudFront in front of it, but doesn't that move the problem? Now the connection between CloudFront and S3 is unencrypted.

(I'm probably understanding this wrong, but I'd like to understand why.)

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