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> 1. Encryption really was expensive in 1996 or so, but in the age of multicores, its questionable if there's a real cost now.

A lot of "budget-priced" hosting services are near-free for http and heavily-surcharged for https. - Pricing it to make it seem as if there were some huge cost difference. Makes a difference when shoestring clubs/nonprofits want to throw up a cheap static site.

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That's because SSL is a shitty protocol, it has nothing to do with CPU.

Turns out that you can only have one SSL applied to one IP because browsers* can't tell the webserver hosting 1,000 sites which particular site you're requesting, because of, you guessed it, encryption.

Essentially, you're paying for a dedicated IP not CPU.

*theres a fix for this supported by several browsers, but it will never be backported to legacy browsers and the millions who won't upgrade for many years so its unsafe to assume you can use this method, thus one IP per SSL for the foreseeable future.

The problem is really only with IE on XP; of course, that's still a huge share. We can thank MS for that, since if other browsers support in on XP, there's no reason IE couldn't, especially considering 7+ already does in Vista and 7.

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