What do you mean, lose ability to cache? You cache payload, don't matter whether encrypted or not. FUD. HTTPS is as cacheable as HTTP. CDNs cache all the way. All types of gateways and services. https://www.httpvshttps.com/ . This should be enough, again FUD, since you can optimize TLS roundtrips up to 3 (with TLS 1.3, you can even send the request payload on the first packet). Internet Identity is more than logging in. Your IP is tracked. Your cookies are tracked. Your content is modified. Your content is associated with the IP. Profiles are established. You can offload SSL termination to your provider's gateway, so you don't have to handle it yourself. What options does the cheap web hosting provide, how much setup does that involve, how much (if any) the certificate costs, those are all different questions. Yes there is. PRISM. Protocol Upgrades (the only reason why browsers only support HTTP/2 over TLS). If the first might sound paranoid to you, the second should present a business case, which can mean saves in server provisioning. I mean, in 2017, with all the different options regarding proxy/web server configurations and access to free certificates and wildly better performance and resource utilization when using TLS, specially on top of HTTP/2, I'm not sure what can still be held against it.