SSL should be a universally available free resource. I expect that it will be in the near future. That said, it is still very cheap for small sites too:
$9 - $11 / year for perfectly good certs. Less than $1 per month is a small burden.
I understand what you're saying, requiring SSL doesn't seem like too much of a burden superficially. But it's magnitudes harder and more frustration inducing than simply buying a domain. My website is protected by the cheapest certificate on that list, and it was a gigantic pain to set up. Also, only the root subdomain on my site is protected -- I have things on other subdomains which I can't encrypt because $10 dollars a year quickly adds up.
That's not the cost. You have to pay someone to re-sign your cert every (other) year. This is a largely manual process. It's also going to cost you, if you want any compensation at all when they forget. Which they will, no matter how well you prepare.
All modern browsers support SNI [1]. I guess if you need to support IE8 on WinXP you'll have problems. And IIRC, wget on Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't support it (while curl does). But it's picked up a lot in recent years, which thankfully eases the dedicated IP requirement in many cases.
Absolutely no need for a dedicated IP unless you want to support very old versions of Windows or very old versions of Android. I haven't allocated a dedicated IP solely for SSL in years.
$9 - $11 / year for perfectly good certs. Less than $1 per month is a small burden.
https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/domain-v...