To answer bitmarlys question about isps seeing the url: In short yes they can.
The dns system is not encrypted so the first thing that is done when trying to establish the tcp connection to the server is to contact a dns server and ask for the information about the host you are trying to connect to. In most cases this dns server that you hit first is controlled by your isp and they can see what host you are looking for. The dns server (won't get into dns authorities as this will get really long) returns the ip address that your machine will actually connect to. So a url of say google.com/?q=dns (transport doesn't matter aka: http, https, ws, wss, ftp, tftp...) is actually 173.194.123.46/?q=dns. Essentially the name of the host in this url is google.com and it is just a friendly mask for the ip address 173.194.123.46.
You can try this yourself by opening a command prompt and typing ping google.com (or any other domain you want).