• Friday, February 17, 2017

Spiral Hosting are making it easier than ever to secure your website with HTTPS. We have introduced a new AutoSSL feature on all our shared hosting, enterprise hosting and reseller hosting plans.

AutoSSL is an automatically provisioned SSL certificate securing your HTTPS website (whether it is a domain, sub-domain, add-on domain or alias). AutoSSL offers a DV (domain validated) SSL certificate, which will encrypt all data sent between your HTTPS website and a visitor's web browser.

AutoSSL is already rolled out across all our web servers, so you or your web developer can implement full HTTPS mode across your website(s) at any time. AutoSSL is a 90-day cPanel-signed SSL certificate, and it will automatically renew every 90 days.

We recommend all clients consider implementing full HTTPS mode for several reasons:

1) Google gives a higher search ranking to SSL websites -
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

2) Mozilla has announced it will phase out web browser features for non-SSL websites -
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-non-secure-http/

3) Microsoft, Safari and other big technology providers have made similar announcements.

In addition to AutoSSL, we continue to sell SSL certificates from big brands like Comodo, GeoTrust and GlobalSign, which are an excellent option for securing your website for 1-3 years. For example Comodo Positive SSL certificates are available for only €39+vat per year, or if the website is for a limited company we would recommend an organisation validated (OV) or extended validated (EV) certificate - they cost a bit more and include the limited company name in the certificate details. Please see the SSL Certs page on our website for full details.

Here are some useful resources on enabling HTTPS on your websites:

1) Google - Maintain your site - Secure your site with HTTPS
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en

2) Search Engine Land - HTTP to HTTPS: An SEO’s guide to securing a website
http://searchengineland.com/http-https-seos-guide-securing-website-246940

3) Spiral Hosting - FAQ's - Introduction to AutoSSL
https://secure.spiralhosting.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=166

4) Spiral Hosting - FAQ's - Use an .htaccess file to force site-wide HTTPS mode
https://secure.spiralhosting.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=164

5) Spiral Hosting - FAQ's - Enabling HTTPS on a WordPress website
https://secure.spiralhosting.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=165