Matt R. Staff

Merv,

Over the past few days much has been made about Google's announcement to update Chrome so that it notifies users if a login form is insecure and potentially transmitting login data over an insecure connection. Google has actually been planning on this transition for sometime (https://goo.gl/9Be0Ow), and Gustave has quietly been working behind the scenes in preparation. The Google announcement, however, has pushed the roll-out time frame a bit.

That said, Gustave is currently working on transitioning each of our servers to automatically include SSL by default, for no extra cost. The server that you are on was transitioned today.

I should note, though, that these changes require time to propagate throughout the domain name system, so not every website on our servers will be able see the effect immeadiatly.

Also, it should especially be noted that the use of third party scripts that utilize links with non-secure http links will result in a message that the site is not secure. This can also happen with hard coded embedded images that use http links. This is what is known as mixed content, and will need to be addressed by the individual user to correct the message (i.e. - it is not a problem with the SSL, but rather the way that the person has his/her website set up).

Regards,
Matt
SimplyHosting.net

 

Merv,

Everybody at Simply Hosting has a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate if they did not have an SSL before. These are three month certs, we will do our best to automatically keep them updated upon renewal. You do not have to do anything for yours. We will attempt to renew the one you have when the time comes. As long as Let's Encrypt stays free we should be able to keep doing this. I am not aware, at this time, of anything that could become a problem in the future. We can all hope they stay free and offer an API to generate certs.

It would seem there is not a global setting to redirect traffic to https for TNG. People will need to re-direct through .htaccess as we have done for you with the following code or equivalent. 


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

The code above may not work for some but it seems to be working for your site and a few others. I do not know if there will be negative impacts to special setups or other things that users may have on their site.

Please note if you give any instructions that if people have "Mixed Content" that will need to be resolved for their site to be secure. What I know now is that a base TNG install will not have "Mixed Content".

Regards,

Gustave Dahl
Simply Hosting .:. Owner