So today I was showing Yao Jun something on my website, And he came back to complain about the lack of https.
Which is so him, trying to make me the best of myself and stuff when it comes to things that is under his area of expertise.
So what is HTTPS? Well HTTP means “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol”. This is basically the method of how data is transferred over a network from a website to your browser. (I learnt this in a Networks class back in University, it goes pretty deep, has many levels which describes how data is packaged and everything which you can probably go and google if you’re interested in.) The “S” basically just means “secure”. What this means is that the data that is sent between the website and your browser are encrypted and thus secure. This is good practice to ensure your information is safe from hackers (because how a network works is basically data is jumping from place to place, router to router to get to you, and we don’t want anyone coming in between that right?).
So why doesn’t every website have it? Well to get your website secure, you need to get a certificate form a certificate authority. And usually you have to pay for this. But poor people like me don’t have the funds to pay for one. Which is why Lets Encrypt is great.
From their website:
“We give people the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites, for free, in the most user-friendly way we can. We do this because we want to create a more secure and privacy-respecting Web.”
Basically, its free and easy to install. You just need to go to the “Get Started Guide” on their page and it basically walks you through all the steps to get your website secure.
For me, I have shell access, I made this website from scratch, so installing it wasn’t much of a hassle. You may have different issues if you don’t have shell access. However, when doing the installation I did come across a little hiccup..
So I had wanted to get all of my domains secure (jeannelmah.com, www.jeannelmah.com, jeannelmah.rocks, www.jeannelmah.rocks), but turns out, I hadn’t properly set up my Domain Name Service (DNS) for www.jeannelmah.rocks.
(There are technical differences between www websites and non www websites, but I’m not the best person to ask about the topic, I’ll probably go read it up at some point.)
So, continuing on with my story, because of this hiccup, I have to go and configure my domain. So I had to login to Namecheap (where I bought my domain name) to get DNS set up properly. Screenshots of the process are below:
After all that’s said and done, just continue on with the installation and viola, my website is now secure.
Now that I’ve got that settled, I’m gonna need to change any instances in my website codes (templates, settings etc) which mentions “http://” to “https://”, its probably gonna take me a while since I don’t have every instance of this mapped out at the top of my head, so some things may break in the coming weeks, but well, you don’t get progress if you don’t go through some pain.
