Is it safe to use SSL SNI in production?
Thanks to SNI technology you can now host multiple SSL certificates on a single IP address. But what is SNI? How does it work its magic? What are the disadvantages? Let’s take a closer look and decide together if you should use SNI for your production websites.
Two announcements that shook the Internet
Could the Internet be reaching its last days? Surely it could never happen? Ok, perhaps slightly melodramatic, but a few recent incidents clearly demonstrated the impact IPv4 address shortages are starting to have on everyday Internet operations.
One of the largest outages in Internet history recently shook the online community. Major Internet Services Providers like BT and Virgin in the UK and AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon in the US went down. It appears that these outages were all caused by growth of the BGP routing table – a knock-on impact of the increasing scarcity of available IPv4 addresses.
Our friends over at Microsoft Azure also had their own problems when they ran out of spare IPv4 addresses earlier this year.
Add to that the fact that Google have started giving a ranking boost to secure https/SSL sites, and intends to accelerate the prominence of this factor in future. So Google are at it again – shaping the lives of SEO experts and their clients the world over. This time there’s a catch due to the implications this has for excessive IPv4 address consumption!
New website & services
Our new website, community and this blog have all gone live today, replacing our previous website which has served us well for almost six years. A big THANK YOU to everyone who has worked on this project over the last 10 months – great work!
As is often the case with projects like this every step has taken twice as much time as expected, but we really wanted to make sure we’ve incorporated all of the feedback we’ve gathered from our loyal customers and staff over the past six years and are very happy with the end result.
Please check out our fabulous new website and range of services and let us know what you think!
This is an important step because it allows us to showcase our services and product features fully, which we’ve never really done before, but it’s also important to our customers because we’ve radically reinvented our range of services – we’re now offering what we think are the most competitive and complete Managed Hosting Services around with some great new enhancements!
Here are some of the highlights:
- New range of Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme products featuring Plesk Panel 10
- New range of Dedicated Server and Complex Hosting products for customers with more bespoke or specialist requirements including high-availability, clustering and load-balancing
- New range of load-balancing, SSL certificates, trust marks and a wider range of domain names
- Introduction of our new ‘Care Pack‘ concept where we bundle a range of exciting new features and an SLA-backed service guarantee across our entire Cloud VPS, Cloud VPS Extreme and Dedicated hosting ranges – this includes some significant free enhancements which we are also rolling out to all existing VPS customers!
- Global coverage with our existing UK and USA and new Singapore managed hosting!
We’ll be posting much more in the coming days and weeks about our new range of services and in-depth discussions about some of the exciting new features and what the changes mean to you.
We’re working very hard to bring even more to you in the near future.
Watch out for the beta launch of a really exciting new service at the beginning of next month!
Let us know what you think!