Cheap SSL certification for an app hosted on Heroku - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a Rails app on Heroku and I would need to add there a SSL certificate. In the Heroku add-ons section I see that is possible to buy on Heroku add-on, but the price is $20/month, which is $240 and I cannot afford it at the moment.
Is there any cheaper way to get an SSL for a Heroku app?

Answer 1

We've installed our SSL certificate on a DigitalOcean.com instance running Nginx as a reverse proxy.
Trade-offs include a bump in latency and paying for bandwidth overages but those haven't been issues for us.
Here is a basic Nginx config similar to ours:
server {
listen 80;
rewrite ^ https://www.example.com$request_uri? permanent;
}
# HTTPS server
server {
listen 443;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /root/example.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /root/example.key;
ssl_session_timeout 5m;
ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1;
ssl_ciphers ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv3:+EXP;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
location / {
proxy_pass https://example.herokuapp.com/;
}
}
This is a basic example and could be made a little more secure (possibly forcing SSL in your app) but this gets you started.
This also gives you the opportunity to speed up your app by creating a cache or serving the app's static assets. You could upload your precompiled assets and have Nginx serve them like this:
location /assets/ {
root /path-to/assets/;
expires 1y;
add_header Cache-Control public;
}
EDIT: July 2017
My, how things have changed. There are a lot of low/no cost solutions for this now. Cloudflare is a great option.