A couple of weeks back, somebody I know asked me how I went about deploying SSL certificates from the Let's Encrypt project across all of my stuff.  Without going into too much detail about what SSL and TLS are (but here's a good introduction to them), the Let's Encrypt project will issue SSL certificates to anyone who wants one, provided that they can prove somehow that they control what they're cutting a certificate for.  You can't use Let's Encrypt to generate a certificate for google.com because they'd try to communicate with the server (there isn't any such thing but …

As you may or may not be aware, I've been a customer of Dreamhost for many years now (if you want to give them a try, here's my referral link).  Both professionally and personally, I've been hosting stuff with them without many complaints (their grousing about my websites being too large is entirely reasonable given that I'm on their shared hosting plan).  Something always got me about their SSL support, though, was that you had to buy a unique IP address from them if you wanted to use it.  That cost a pretty penny, almost as much as I pay …