How to Get: HTTPS

Setting up certs and cert management for 1,000s of domains and subdomains

Short answer: with Backplane. Backplane provisions and manages HTTPS certificates for all of your domains, handles establishing secure connections, and proxies HTTPS requests to your websites and backend services. It does all of this without any code changes to your websites or backend services. Backplane handles the provisioning and rotation of certificates automatically, so you can sit back and relax while we future-proof your sites in minutes. What’s more Backplane’s API allows you to dynamically add new domains and remove old ones.

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP. The difference between HTTP and HTTPS is HTTPS uses encryption when sending the information. This ensures the way we purchase, log-on, send and share is safe from unwanted eyes.

Browsers have gradually been increasing their security levels and marking websites as secure or not secure in recent years, but in July browsers will begin filtering out websites still using HTTP. This blog post will explain the importance of HTTPS, why you need to make the switch, and how to manage this migration for all of your domains and subdomains with ease.

HTTPS is the future of the Internet. Setting up HTTPS is easier and cheaper than ever before thanks to organizations like Let’s Encrypt and Backplane. This is causing HTTPS usage by websites to skyrocket. In turn, web browsers and search engines have begun to flag non-HTTPS websites as insecure and demote them in search results in an effort to better protect users’ privacy. Soon it will be bad business to run any website without HTTPS.

What is an HTTPS certificate?
When a website uses a trusted SSL digital certificate the browser will check this and then display a trusted padlock symbol that reassures the user that the website is protected. With this symbol they will know that the website is able to protect their data.

HTTPS protects your users’ data from attackers trying to intercept network traffic. This includes attackers setting up phony wifi hotspots, as well as those surreptitiously exfiltrating data from internet service providers. HTTPS improves your SEO with multiple search engines. HTTPS enables the latest web browser features such as HTTP2 Multiplexing which in many cases can reduce latency of a website with zero code changes.

All organizations benefit from HTTPS — from online retailers to publishing platforms. For user privacy it is essential for sites that handle any user generated data or track users. For sites that want to be ranked on Google it is essential. For sites that load multiple resources from the same domain it will greatly reduce latency. Basically for any site that isn’t a static page, it’s essential. For those that are a static page, there are CDN services that provide free HTTPS for custom domains and greatly reduce geographic latency for users throughout the world.

How can I make my sites HTTPS now?
So now you’re ready to start making the most of HTTPS. Maybe you have 1–10 domains and subdomains. Maybe you have 100s-1000s of domains and subdomains. Either way how does all of this work? How can you make sure certificates are rotated for these domains and how can you add and remove domains at will? With Backplane setting up HTTPS for your websites is automated and fully-managed.

Try Backplane today free for 30-days and keep using us for as little as $1/cert/month. For more complex setups or troubleshooting send us a note and we’ll get your HTTPS compliant in less than a day.