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Heroku and SSL

Heroku is a great hosting platform. Using it lets you focus on your application and not worry about operations tasks that might otherwise take developer time. Tasks like updating the operating system, patching the web server, and configuring third party services like monitoring. There are limits of course–once you reach a certain size it can be pricey. And if you have a app that has special requirements (example here), you might have to jump through some hoops. But if you are building a typical web app backed by a relational database, I’d highly recommend Heroku.

SSL is the technology which ensures that data sent over the web is transmitted untampered. Heroku has a number of offerings helping to make SSL easier to install; here’s a page to help you decide between the offerings. Last year Heroku announced support for free, automatically renewable SSL certificates. It does have some limits (no wildcard support, for example).

I just finished updating our system from an older SSL solution to the automated certificate management offering. Other than a slight hiccup around DNS being set up incorrectly by me (quickly fixed after a helpful answer from Heroku support), this update went swimmingly. Now rather than having to deal with SSL updates once a year (reviewing my notes, googling around and paying for a third party certificate), the SSL certificate is updated automatically.

This is just another example of Heroku taking something that is key to operating a web application and making it trivial. What a relief.

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