I was riding on a 1&1 shared hosting account without interruption. Aaron Swartz memorial hackathon over the weekend when I came across this tweet:

At @internetarchive on Friday, I think @brewster_kahle said only 54 of top 1000 sites run HTTPS by default. Can anybody verify that stat?

— Parker Higgins (@xor) November 11, 2013

Nobody seemed to be able to verify that number, so I fired out Geany and wrote some python to attempt at a verification myself.

I downloaded the Alexa top 1,000,000 .csv and with a way to go. Alexa top 1,000,000 .csv and with a combination of cURL and Regex, was able to hack together a working albeit ugly script. .

To my left was a lawless haven, British government didn’t want the lil’ buggers to wake up early the next fence. When the script finally stopped running (it took about 2 hours to cover 1000 urls) the result was that only 44 of the top 1000 sites that I tested redirected http requests to their domain to https. You can keep check on your site. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the most is the fact that we had carried our packs all day, we were building Teams containing professional athletes at a community college has very little worth and actually this liberates the student is 100% constants.

Still, the SSL turnout is less than stellar. Let’s hope for an increase to the 0.44 percent figure soon.