Kloudsec 挂了，GitHub Pages 去 HTTPS 化

Update 2018/05/01: GitHub 官方已经支持自定义域名启用 HTTPS 了，见 https://blog.github.com/2018-05-01-github-pages-custom-domains-https/

前天收到来自 Kloudsec 的邮件，说 Kloudsec 将于 2016/08/01 停止服务。Bad news，请容许我做一个悲伤的表情。

邮件原文

Hi all,

It is with great sadness that I have to inform you that Kloudsec is shutting down.

Why is Kloudsec shutting down?

1. We have been funding Kloudsec out of our own pocket
2. Kloudsec is very expensive to maintain (upwards to $10000 / month)
3. We are unable to make money from Kloudsec, nor raise any funds for it

We will shut Kloudsec down on 1st August

From now till then, we will not be maintaining the service.

Migrating out of Kloudsec

Migrating out of Kloudsec is extremely simple. All you have to do is to point your domain back at its origin server.

You will lose the HTTPS cert. But you can fix that by

• either issuing your own LetsEncrypt certificate
• or using Cloudflare.

Lessons learnt

From the start, we are extremely lucky to have a small revenue stream that let us to experiment with cool products. And Kloudsec is one of our biggest experiment.

There are a couple of things we did right, and a couple we did wrong.

We did right by having the right team come together, building a seriously sophiscated product. (Thank you Ivan and Bach)

We did wrong by building a sophiscated product that made it hard for a small team to maintain, let alone scale.

We did wrong by building a product that was not immediately useful enough so much so that people will pay for.

We did wrong by building a product that was too expensive to maintain.

We did wrong by assuming that traction solves all ailments. Not in Singapore, you don’t. There is no good venture money for real hard-tech software startups in Singapore.

We did right with pulling the plug so we can learn from these mistakes and work on the next product.

What’s next for us

From Kloudsec, we identified a few niche problems that we will be looking to solve. In other words, we will continually be building.

And you can be sure from our next product onwards, we will charge right from day 1 so we can sustain the product financially.

Lastly, thank you!

Thank you. Most of you have spoken to me, or read the posts I’ve written on Github, on Hacker News, or Producthunt about Kloudsec. You guys took a leap of faith in trusting this small unknown team and product, and used us.

I’m sorry to disappoint you with this piece of news, but I’ll try better next time.

If you like, you can follow me on Twitter at @nubela. You can also contact me at anytime at steven@nubela.co

Steven Goh.

我的决定

Sigh!

想起五月份的时候我还欢天喜地地给博客 HTTPS 化了，并为此写了一篇博客 为绑定域名的 GitHub Pages 启用 HTTPS，还将它推荐到了 掘金，收获了 64 次收藏，并在那篇文章下创下了我个人博客单篇评论数最多的记录。

没想到还没等到 Kloudsec 第一次为我的域名证书自动续期，它家的服务就要关停了。

但也没有办法，使用第三方的服务，特别是初创公司的服务本就有这种风险。

本来 GitHub Pages + Custom Domain + HTTPS 也还有其它解决方案，但我已不想再折腾了，多引入一层中间服务，就多一层出状况的风险，我只是想作一名安静地写博客的美男子啊。

所以决定去掉自定义域名的 HTTPS，恢复 HTTP，现在 GitHub Pages 已经支持 *.github.io 域名的 HTTPS，除非哪天它原生支持 Custom Domain 的 HTTPS，否则我不再折腾这个事情。

采取的措施

当初之所以想开启 HTTPS 的一个重要原因就是 Google 收录了博客的 HTTPS 链接，但是证书不对导致用户打不开或者有警告，既然使用自定义域名没有办法让证书对，那就让 Google 不收录 HTTPS 的链接吧。

告诉 Google 不收录 HTTPS 链接

如果一个页面使用 HTTPS 和 HTTP 都能访问，那如果想 Google 只收录 HTTP 版，而不收录 HTTPS 版，那可以在页面的 head 里添加 canonical 给爬虫以建议，具体方法如下：

<link rel="canonical" href="http 开头的 URL">