The main purpose of the SSL in my mind was to attempt to get around the problem of having port 80 blocked by my ISP. I was hoping I could channel everything through port 443 by getting an SSL. I may be way off in my understanding of how this all works, but that was my original intention. Security was definitely a strong second reason.
I’ve found some promising potential solutions, and Cloudflare is written down as something I need to check out.
This is something that is very important to me, so that’s fantastic if it ends up working the way I would need it to.
In the end, I would love to have performance benefits, security, and mask my the IP of my webserver using the domain name I purchased, but we’ll see if I can pull all that off. I’m learning as I go 
Anyway, thanks for pointing me to Cloudflare! I’ll reply to this page or edit my initial post with whatever I end up settling with just in case it’s helpful to others down the road.