Over the last two weeks, we’ve started rolling out a new generation of edge routers for our managed hosting platform freistilbox. By automatically provisioning SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, they enable our customers to secure their website traffic easily and free of charge. And with 10 Gbps uplinks and HTTP/2 support, we’re putting a nice performance boost on top.

With a single click, freistilbox customers can secure their website traffic using an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority that provides provides certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption, and conveniently, the process is free of charge and fully automated.

In order to enable Let’s Encrypt TLS, make sure your website can be reached from the web, open your website’s details on the freistilbox dashboard and click the “Enable Let’s Encrypt” button. Within minutes, our edge routers will automatically request and install your free SSL certificate.

But there’s more! Our new edge routers not only transfer web traffic securely but also faster than the generations prior. At the hardware level, they’re using high-performance network uplinks with a bandwidth of 10 Gbit/s. And at the other end of the networking stack, our managed hosting platform now also supports HTTP/2. HTTP/2 is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol aiming at the following improvements:

• Decrease latency to improve page load speed in web browsers
• Data compression of HTTP headers
• HTTP/2 Server Push
• Pipelining of requests
• Fixing the head-of-line blocking problem in HTTP 1.x
• Multiplexing multiple requests over a single TCP connection

With these improvements combined, we’ve given freistilbox a substantial boost in web content delivery performance. Every new website you launch on our managed hosting platform will benefit from these improvements automatically.

We’re very excited about shipping these features! Providing secure managed hosting is one of our main concerns at freistil IT, and we’re happy to also make it powerful, simple and affordable.