You may have noticed that when you access your site, there is a change in the way the URL looks in the address-bar on your browser? In a long-overdue upgrade, all our customer sites have been upgraded from HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) to HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol secure).
What is the difference?
In an ordinary HTTP session, data that flows to/from the server and the user’s computer is sent in plain text, this means that hackers connected in between may be able to see what is being transmitted.
Using HTTPS, the server and the user’s computer agree on a “code” between them, and then they encrypt the data flowing between them using that “code”, so that no one in between can read them. This keeps your information much safer from hackers.
Redirect
Customer sites have been re-configured, so that all requests for the old HTTP pages are redirected to the new HTTPS version instead. This redirection should happen automatically, with no intervention form the user. A few sites required a little page-by-page tweaking, too. But as far as I am aware, all customer sites have now been upgraded successfully.
Internal projects
Our own sites, deoss.net and deoss.com have also been upgraded to https. All our other projects will follow shortly.
More information
The Wikipedia has a very good page that describes HTTPS and its relative advantages:-