Are there any downsides of running your full website in https

I have a website that makes heavy use of AJAX. There is an almost constant transfer of sensitive data.

Because of this I was thinking of running my full website in HTTPS, making i开发者_如何转开发t secure throughout your stay.

I was wondering if there are any downsides doing this. Performance is a huge issue for me, the faster the app runs the better. I can safely say that speed is a larger issue than the security.

On the security side, I already generate a new session id when sensitive data is transfered,so there is no real need to make it all https, but if there are no downsides why not use it.

Can someone please explain to me what the downsides are of using https for everything.

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Well, there is obviously the overhead of encrypting everything all the time. It's probably not a huge problem for the client (since it's only encrypting data for a single connection) but it can become a bottleneck on the server (since it has to encrypt everything for every connection).

You could implement an SSL proxy where you have a front-end web server that talks SSL to clients and then forwards requests to the "backend" webservers for real processing. The backend webservers would be firewalled and not use SSL.