Here’s something that may not have occurred to first-time e-commerce entrepreneurs – SSL is expensive. Very expensive. The load it puts on the processor for each SSL-encrypted request is orders of magnitude greater than that of requests to normal, port 80 requests. This has the obvious effect of reduced load tolerance, slower response times, etc etc. Many companies circumvent this problem by employing a hardware SSL accelerator which allows the additional computing to be offloaded to either a card in the server, or a separate piece of kit altogether. All well and good, but these dedicated pieces of hardware can run into the tens of thousands to purchase, rendering it out of reach for those in the early stages.
Here’s where the fun starts: using freely-available web server Nginx on a low-cost (comparatively) server in the hosting infrastructure and a bit of proxying know-how, you can create a completely configurable SSL accelerator for a fraction of the cost.
Check out this tutorial on o3 magazine to see how