On many hosting platforms, including our own DrupalCONCEPT, secure traffic that is encrypted via SSL has to be handled directly by the web server. This not only puts additional computing load on those servers, it also prevents HTTP caching which means less responsiveness. To speed up the delivery of static page assets, some customers choose to use “mixed mode”, i.e. deliver these assets via HTTP even if the page is requested via SSL. But because this workaround can cause sensitive data to be transferred in an insecure way, it is not a practice we recommend.

For freistilbox, we eliminated this shortcoming! If you want to add SSL encryption to a website hosted on freistilbox, we have a great feature for you: SSL offloading. This means that SSL packets are decrypted the moment they reach our freistilbox infrastructure. The content of these SSL packets is then passed on to the next system layers as plain HTTP requests. This has several advantages.

First, content caching works both for plain HTTP and for SSL traffic. Since the Varnish cache proxy is located between the SSL offloading layer and your freistilboxes, it can store static assets and even pages regardless of encryption. You really don’t need to unsettle your visitors with those “mixed content” browser warnings.

The second benefit of SSL offloading is made obvious by its name: Your web application servers don’t have to use precious computing resources for decrypting requests and encrypting responses. Our hosting platform takes complete care of that. (As usual with freistilbox, I can’t resist to add.)

So go on, make your website more secure and enable SSL! You’ll find everything you need to set up SSL in our online documentation.