I got a hardware loadbalancer for my https://clubcompy.com cluster and it offered hardware SSL encryption. So I thought, what the heck, I'll encrypt all the things! It's a site for kids after all, so I had better at least try to keep 'em safe from the bad guys. Https hasn't slowed the site down one bit, although it took quite a bit of hacking to get every single page to be encrypted. Ended up using a servlet filter to force all requests to redirect to https it rather than configuring anything at the web tier or on the LB.