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The Orange Cloud Report

Core platform

SSL/TLS

Score: 9/10

Free universal certs changed the whole industry.

Last updated

Universal SSL made HTTPS free and automatic for millions of sites years before it was fashionable, and the modern iteration is still excellent: automatic issuance and renewal, Total TLS for covering every subdomain, and Advanced Certificate Manager when you need control over CAs, validity, or hostnames.

Origin CA certificates (free 15-year certs for the Cloudflare-to-origin hop) plus Full (strict) mode is a setup I’d consider mandatory, and it takes about ten minutes.

The missing point is for the sharp edges: certificate validation getting stuck in rare cases with vague dashboard messaging, the occasional renewal that needs a manual nudge, and some genuinely useful controls (custom cipher suites, for example) being locked behind higher tiers.