CloudFlare Universal SSL - Free SSL for your website

[Arthur]

I think this might be of interest to a few people here.

 

Source: CloudFlare Blog

 

The team at CloudFlare is excited to announce the release of Universal SSL™. Beginning today, we will support SSL connections to every CloudFlare customer, including the 2 million sites that have signed up for the free version of our service.

 

This morning we began rolling out the Universal SSL across all our current customers. We expect this process to be complete for all current customers before the end of the day. Yesterday, there were about 2 million sites active on the Internet that supported encrypted connections. By the end of the day today, we'll have doubled that.

 

For new customers who sign up for CloudFlare's free plan, after we get through provisioning existing customers, it will take up to 24 hours to activate Universal SSL. As always, SSL for paid plans will be provisioned instantly upon signup.

 

How does it work?

For all customers, we will now automatically provision a SSL certificate on CloudFlare's network that will accept HTTPS connections for a customer's domain and subdomains. Those certificates include an entry for the root domain (e.g., example.com) as well as a wildcard entry for all first-level subdomains (e.g., http://www.example.com, blog.example.com, etc.).

 

For a site that did not have SSL before, we will default to our Flexible SSL mode, which means traffic from browsers to CloudFlare will be encrypted, but traffic from CloudFlare to a site's origin server will not. We strongly recommend site owners install a certificate on their web servers so we can encrypt traffic to the origin. Later today we'll be publishing a blog with instructions on how to do that at no cost. Once you've installed a certificate on your web server, you can enable the Full or Strict SSL modes which encrypt origin traffic and provide a higher level of security.

 

Edited October 12, 2014 by Arthur