Today, Hillary Clinton announced that she’s running for president. She also launched a new website.
Over the next year, political pundits will spend far too much time dissecting the horse race, scandals (real or imagined), the electoral college and more polls than you can shake a stick at. I’m doing none of that. I’m just looking at websites.
So, you want to run a country. Can you hire someone who can run a website? These days, that means all new sites, whether running the government or delivering news should be built over HTTPS.
Here’s how the (declared) candidates’ sites fare:
| Site | hillaryclinton.com | tedcruz.org | randpaul.com | marcorubio.com | Expected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTTPS works | ✔ | ish [1] | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| HTTPS default | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| HSTS | ✖ | — | — | ✖ | ✔ |
| Requires SNI [2] | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ |
| https site.com | redirects to www | 404 error | works | works | — |
| https www.site.com | works | redirects to http://www.tedcruz.org | works | redirects to https://marcorubio.com | — |
| canonical hostname | www.hillaryclinton.com | www.tedcruz.org | none | marcorubio.com | something |
| SSL Labs rating | A [3] | A | A | A | A+ |
| sha2 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ | ✔ |
| intermediate sha2 | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ |
| cert vendor | Comodo | RapidSSL | RapidSSL | Comodo | — |
| intermediate cert vendor | Comodo | GeoTrust Global CA | GeoTrust Global CA | Comodo | — |
| cert type | Wildcard | Wildcard | Wildcard | SAN | Wildcard or Standard |
| CDN | Fastly | CloudFlare | CloudFlare | CloudFlare | something |
| Server signature | nginx (hc.com) AmazonS3 (www) |
CloudFlare nginx | CloudFlare nginx | CloudFlare nginx | — |
| Tech | Python (?) [gunicorn 19.1.1 + Varnish] groundwork [4] |
WordPress 4.1.1 | PHP 5.5.9 Ubuntu |
WordPress 4.1.1 | — |
| Registrar | Network Solutions | GoDaddy | Fabulous.com Pty Ltd | GoDaddy | hopefully not GoDaddy |
| Whois Privacy | — | Domains By Proxy, LLC | Whois Privacy Services Pty Ltd | Domains By Proxy, LLC | — |
| Origin IP | ?? | 64.39.8.246 [5] | ?? | ?? | — |
| Origin Server | ?? | Apache/2.2 | ?? | ?? | — |
| Mail server | Gmail | Gmail | Gmail | Gmail | — |
| IPv6 | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| ESP (SPF) | SilverPOP Systems | Marketo, Sendgrid | Mailgun | VerveMail | — |
| SPF type | TXT | TXT | TXT | SPF | TXT |
| robots.txt | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ | ✔ |
| robots details | Disallow: /api/ | Disallow: /wp-admin/ | nothing disallowed | [6] | — |
| Site | hillaryclinton.com | tedcruz.org | randpaul.com | marcorubio.com | Expected |
I’ll update this as more candidates declare or sites change.
Notes
- https://www.tedcruz.org works, but https://tedcruz.org gives a 404 error.
- Sites that require Server Name Indication (SNI), such as this one, are incompatible with a handful of legacy browsers.
- Fastly’s www.hillaryclinton.com gets a score of 90 on key exchange, while the AWS servers (hillaryclinton.com) get a score of 80. The AWS servers also have an extra cert in the chain (signed with SHA1).
- Groundwork appears to be a custom JavaScript web framework. It does not seem to be related to either the I Like Robots Groundwork or Groundwork CSS.
- Likely origin, based on server responses.
- Redirects to https://www.marcorubio.com/landing/stream/.
Updates
- 2:01am EDT: Fixed randpaul.com topline.
- 8:46am EDT: Fixed spelling of spend and fastly.
- 11:33am EDT: marcobuio.com (now) seems to have certs signed with SHA-1.
- 2:27pm EDT: Added robots.txt.
- 2:35pm EDT: Added “Expected” column.