Model Railway Forum

Blimey - you don't hang about do you? Guess the spare ½ hour turned up sooner than you expected. R-

Thanks Brian.......and relax.

A certificate is not strictly required when using https. All it really does is say to the site visitor that you are connected to a safe site validated by the certificate thus putting the visitor's mind to rest.
I run several sites and the Let's Encrypt cert is free and most host providers offer it. You just had to keep renewing it evey few months, although hosts are now doing this for you automatically, whilst the authors of Let's Encrypt sorted a bug.

It'd be a bit daft to use https without a cert anyway. Rather a pointless exercise. I use Let's Encrypt and really don't see why this is still a charged for service by other vendors today.

You can tell if any site is secured by looking at the address bar and seeing a green lock to the left side of the address of the site you are visiting. If that ain't solid green then the site is not secure, probably no cert or it requires renewal.

I use Google Chrome in the main and that's secure padlock is black on all HTTPS:?? web sites. Switch to Firefox and it is then Green. So green is not the only colour. I believe its more important the padlock shows locked regardless of its colour.

Yup, just to confirm that a black locked padlock is the symbol used in Safari. R-

On my tablet, using Chrome, the padlock is a very, very dark green that looks like black until i look very closely at it. The https:// part is also dark green.