Is it possible to use https with Winhost without having an SSL certificate? I can't seem to find any documentation for this. I want to be able to use https with certain calls for the website but am not ready to fork out the money for the certificate at this time.
A lot of hosts used to offer "shared" SSL (some probably still do), but it's not really any good for a serious application. There are a lot of problems inherent in offering shared SSL, and none of them have good remedies.
That makes sense. I know with II7 one can create a self-signed certificate. Would there be a way for me to do that for my website initially and later change it to a more legit certificate?
We cannot support self signed certificates on our production servers. Remember these types of certificates are for testing purposes and really do not belong on a production server. Furthermore self signed certificates (also known as testing certificates) will require that we install the intermediate certificate on our server. To make sure we keep things standardized and easily maintainable we only install well known and standard root certificates on our servers. Such as GoDaddy and Verisign are among the few. If we start allowing test certificates installed we will have a large number of root certificates floating in the server, and when you host multiple servers you can imagine it is just hard to keep things standardized.