Free Cloud VM & HTTPS

(251 words) Sun, Oct 15, 2017

If your knowledge of what it takes to have an SSL encrypted website (aka https) is as outdated as mine was a couple of weeks ago - you will find this quick post useful.

A colleague of mine recently mentioned the fact that you can get SSL certificate for any website for free. I know that issuing certificates was every CA’s business model for ages, and so I was very surprised to learn that. Well, I was in for a pleasant surprise.

So I looked around (well, first result of ‘free https’ on Google) and it turns out a non-profit named letsencrypt gives free certificates. 2017 baby. So I immediately went to the instructions, which to my disappointment said that if one is using a shared-hosting he/she can either manually create and renew certificates periodically (unless of course the shared-hosting company supports letsencrypt, but why would they if they make money selling the same product?).

Disappointed, I searched for an alternative solution. Luckily, Google recently announced that they started a Cloud program called ‘Always Free’ which gives an f1-micro instance for free without expiration (more details here). A free always-on, cloud-based Linux machine? That’s even better than https for my blog!

If you’re still here you must love freebies, like myself; keep on reading. I already have a dot-com domain. But my friend also mentioned dot.tk, which is a free .tk domain anyone can register. So if you’re starting fresh you could get free domain, hosting and https. I love freebies!