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CloudFlare Announces Free SSL Support For All Customers

Posted by Soulskill on from the big-step-in-the-right-direction dept.

Z80xxc! writes: CloudFlare, a cloud service that sits between websites and the internet to provide a CDN, DDOS and other attack prevention, speed optimization, and other services announced today that SSL will now be supported for all customers, including free customers. This will add SSL support to approximately 2 million previously unprotected websites. Previously SSL was only available to customers paying at least $20/month for a "Pro" plan or higher.

Browsers connect to CloudFlare's servers and receive a certificate provided by CloudFlare. CloudFlare then connects to the website's server to retrieve the content, serving as a sort of reverse proxy. Different security levels allow CloudFlare to connect to the website host using no encryption, a self-signed certificate, or a verified certificate, depending on the administrator's preferences. CloudFlare's servers will use SNI for free accounts, which is unsupported for IE on Windows XP and older, and Android Browser on Android 2.2 and older.

4 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In the Market by Z80xxc! · · Score: 5, Informative

    CloudFlare isn't a host, it's a sort of advanced CDN with extra features. You still need to have the website hosted on another server somewhere. Their website explains how it works better than I can, so you might as well read it there: https://www.cloudflare.com/ove...

  2. Re:In the Market by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    But if your site is behind a CDN proxy and highly cacheable, then you can probably get away with cheap hosting like WebFaction or something.

  3. Re:In the Market by Z80xxc! · · Score: 3, Informative

    Indeed. I run a couple websites that see a decent amount of traffic. CloudFlare up front, Webfaction on the backend. Works quite well overall. Very speedy load times and easy to set up. I'm looking forward to enabling SSL for all my sites. I have had some troubles getting the right IP addresses into logs and applications though... WebFaction's nginx reverse proxy adds an X-FORWARDED-FOR header, which replaces that sent by CloudFlare with the CloudFlare IP... so you end up not getting the right IP returned.

  4. Re:The illusion of security by Gerald · · Score: 3, Informative

    They discuss origin server encryption (the plaintext issue) in a follow-on blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/or...