Congratulations! You’ve decided to set up a Web site. The site might be for your personal use, for sharing family pictures, for a blog, for an SaaS application, or any number of other possibilities. In all of those cases, people will access your site using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP has evolved and improved through the years, but one thing about it hasn’t changed—the fact that all of the traffic sent on an HTTP connection is unencrypted.
The bottom line is that whether you want or need to do so, adding HTTPS to a site you’re running isn’t very hard to do. In this Geek Guide, I walk through what SSL/TLS is (and isn’t), how you can create or buy a certificate, how to install that certificate into an Apache server and then how to configure Apache such that a subset of URLs on your system are covered by SSL.