&gt; It&#x27;s still buy a certificate and set it up in nginx&#x2F;apache&#x2F;your favourite load balancer&#x2F;etc.<p>To a first order approximation, yes, and for small and medium sites, that&#x27;s pretty accurate. But for very large sites, there can be additional complications and expenses, and that situation has improved over the last several years. Don&#x27;t underestimate the effect that the downward price of bandwidth over the years has had - at very large scale, those pennies can really add up.<p>There&#x27;s a reason why sites like Google, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. took so long to add SSL to everything Or why some sites like Comcast still don&#x27;t provide it. It&#x27;s not (always) that they simply don&#x27;t care or don&#x27;t have knowledgeable engineers; it&#x27;s that the logistics of managing[0] SSL at that scale are non-trivial. Arguably worth it, yes, but it&#x27;s not so straightforward.<p>[0] heck, the logistics of paying for - even with a CDN, the marginal cost of adding SSL is not cheap.