You may have noticed that many companies, like Google and Safeco, have begun encouraging website owners to support HTTPS on their own websites and flagging websites you visit if they do not have SSL.
What is so important about SSL (https)?
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and it’s what web browsers and web servers use to communicate.
HTTPS adds an S, which stands for Secure. HTTPS is just like HTTP, but it sits atop an encryption layer (SSL).
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer.
HTTPS provides three main things: privacy, authentication & integrity. All three of these are necessary for what we think of as private communication in any setting (not just online).
Privacy
Privacy means the communications are indecipherable by a third party.
Authentication
Authentication means a sender can be confident the recipient of their message is who they think it is.
Integrity
Integrity is the knowledge that a message has not been tampered with.
Because internet communications happen over a network, SSL achieves privacy through encryption, which is a way of scrambling a message in a way that it can be unscrambled later by only an authenticated recipient.
All Webtricity plans include a hassle-free SSL certificate.