Sonic.net

The issue seems to be growing more critical, as some email apps and browsers convert http URLs automatically to https - and then fail. This has happened to some folks who told me they could not reach my site.

Seems like such a simple thing to fix and it would make so many of us happy.

Please fix this issue with SSL Certificates. I have been a member for nearly twenty years, and I have two sites hosted with your service. Having my sites flagged as insecure is troublesome. This limits my ability to develop which has been my primary reason for staying with Sonic for all of these years. This has an impact on first impressions when dealing with potential new clients. With some extra time on my hands, I decided that I would finally tackle this issue, and now I see that there seems to be no help for it.

Please at least let me know if you have plans for allowing shell users to manage this on their own. If enabling this for Basic and Value customers is outside of your comfort zone as a company, just please let me know so that I can move to another service.

It’s unfortunate that Sonic hasn’t said so officially, but I think their inaction on this speaks for itself.

It’s been three years since Google Chrome began showing a “Not Secure” warning for pages loaded over unencrypted HTTP, and five years since certificates have been available at no cost from Let’s Encrypt. If Sonic wanted to support HTTPS for all their hosting customers, they’ve had plenty of time to do it. The fact that they haven’t makes it clear, at least to me, that the hosting business just isn’t a priority.

That’s not a surprise: Sonic can compete effectively as an ISP in the neighborhoods where they’ve built infrastructure, but in web hosting, Sonic will never be able to operate as efficiently as their larger competitors.

u3zmsm wrote:It’s unfortunate that Sonic hasn’t said so officially, but I think their inaction on this speaks for itself.

It’s been three years since Google Chrome began showing a “Not Secure” warning for pages loaded over unencrypted HTTP, and five years since certificates have been available at no cost from Let’s Encrypt. If Sonic wanted to support HTTPS for all their hosting customers, they’ve had plenty of time to do it. The fact that they haven’t makes it clear, at least to me, that the hosting business just isn’t a priority.

That’s not a surprise: Sonic can compete effectively as an ISP in the neighborhoods where they’ve built infrastructure, but in web hosting, Sonic will never be able to operate as efficiently as their larger competitors.

Certbot (from Let's Encrypt) is very easy to use, but you need root access to use it. I'd add a certificate in a minute if sonic would let me. As it stands, it looks like their web hosting server was abandoned long ago. They have no interest in maintaining it, even for the customers who were there at the beginning.

"It’s unfortunate that Sonic hasn’t said so officially, but I think their inaction on this speaks for itself."

A while back, i'd tweeted to Sonic's owner Dane Jasper (@dane) about the problem with SSL and what an easy fix it would be. *(edit: funny i was reading other answers after posting this and found an almost identical post of mine)

I've since been banned from Twitter but he'd kindly replied to let me know the focus was more on building fiber optic networks and less on hosting.

Maybe more people should start tweeting him to let him know what a problem it is for so many of us - and what an easy fix. I bet an engineer could make necessary tweaks in a matter of hours.

Sadly i used to recommend Sonic and have been a customer since the beginning, these days i wouldn't recommend them because of this simple thing they seem to have zero interest in fixing, sorry for having to mention it.

Didn't Dane Jasper run a 4-line BBS before he started Sonic.net? I seem to remember him being a part of that scene in early 90s.