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There are easy things and difficult things with SSL. It's easy to enable SSL but you can run into various headaches setting up the necessary certificates. You can create your own test certificates easily enough but then the browser isn't going to consider it trustworthy. Not a problem for testing but can be an issue of your users see those warnings.
Hosting
Get yourself a virtual private server (lowest cost option). You'll access the machine via Remote Desktop. It's your machine so you can do what you like. You may want to install an FTP server so you can move files around.
There are lots of little tasks around hosting,
More to come...