Since my previous post about hosting static sites using free services two things have happened.
First, I replaced ZoneEdit‘s DNS service with Cloudflare. I did it mostly to get HTTPS support, which seems to be getting to be the norm faster than I would have imagined (a great thing!).
The way CloudFlare works is by sitting between the client and the hosting server, as a cache. It offers a lot of performance boosts, making it especially useful with a flaky hosting: for example, it supports serving the static content even when the host is down.
Among the functions that they offer is one to encrypt the connection between their servers and the client, providing HTTPS connections even if the website hosting doesn’t encrypt. That isn’t 100% secure, but it moves the vulnerable point to the connection between CloudFlares’s servers and the hosting. (Aerobatic works with the full encryption setting, securing the connection on both ends.)
That setup has been working nicely since then, but today I got an email that brought good news: Aerobatic has started to offer free SSL certificates with their free accounts (before they charged a price that it seemed steep). With that there is no need to do encryption through a third party. That is another huge point for Aerobatic that was already offering an excellent service.