Hawk Host and Let's Encrypt: Sponsor For Another Year!

We’re incredibly happy to announce that Hawk Host is going to be a silver level sponsor of the Let’s Encrypt project for another year! This will be our second consecutive year sponsoring Let’s Encrypt, a year which has shown SSL adoption for sites on our network increase by magnitudes even we did not expect!

For those unfamiliar, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a non-profit organization focused on making the Internet a safer place for everyone. The core concept of the project is to make it free and easy for anyone to install an SSL certificate on their websites, thereby encrypting the traffic passed to the site which keeps your data (regardless of how sensitive) safe from those nefarious actors on the public web.

We have received nothing but positive feedback from our customers since we started offering free SSL over a year ago. Thanks to the efforts of the cPanel team we’ve also been able to automatically install these SSL certificates on any domain hosted with us, increasing the number of secured sites and reducing the amount of work any customer has to do in order to get SSL going on their websites. As a result of this we’re incredibly happy to say that well over 100,000 websites hosted on our network are now fully encrypted and secured by Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.

It’s not just Hawk Host customers that have reaped the benefits of the hard work from the Let’s Encrypt team. As of this post there are nearly 47 million actively issued Let’s Encrypt certificates, a number which grows by about 500,000 per day. If you wanted to check out the numbers yourself there is a public stats page on the Let’s Encrypt website.

Let’s Encrypt is showing no signs of slowing down which is why we found it important to continue supporting the initiative. As a web host we’re keenly aware of just how important a secure web is, and not only does Let’s Encrypt facilitate that but they make it so any website, from a simple travel blog to a high traffic e-commerce shop can run their site confidently knowing their visitors data is encrypted and safe. Not only can you rest easy knowing the data is secure but the SSL certificates are free and require no manual installation, leaving you no excuse not to take advantage of it.

2018 is going to bring even more improvements and we cannot wait to make them available to our customers. You can look forward to support for wildcard SSL certificates, an infrastructure improvement for the more secure ECDSA digital signature algorithm (replacing RSA), and much more as the year goes on.

We have nothing but respect and appreciation for the folks over at Let’s Encrypt. We’re incredibly fortunate and proud to be able to support such a groundbreaking initiative and hope to continue that partnership for years to come.