The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is on the front lines for protecting digital freedom and preventing censorship of the web, applauded content delivery network provider CloudFlare for the company’s recent announcement that it will offer encrypted HTTPs as its default setting for any website it hosts.
CloudFlare CDN provider CloudFlare wants HTTPs encyrption for all websites.
CloudFlare says that with the addition of its 2 million sites covered by HTTPs that the number of sites online using the SSL encryption has doubled to 4 million. Customers who sign up for a free plan through CloudFlare will by default have SSL encryption. The company had previously offered the features as part of a paid plan. Details of CloudFlare's offer are here.
From the EFF blogpost applauding CloudFlare:
“CloudFlare is the first major infrastructure provider to take this step. We congratulate them for reaching this milestone; now, we hope other hosting providers and CDNs will follow in CloudFlare's footsteps by treating HTTPS as a basic, standard part of the web and not a premium feature.”
HTTPs is similar to the standard HTTP protocol, but is creates a secure connection between the visitor and any server using what is an SSL certificate, as GoDaddy explains here. The certificate verifies the identity of the server, ensuring that a hacker is not posing as a website and collecting information from users.
Your move, other CDNs.