Reasons to purchase an SSL Certificate

These days many sites are secured by an SSL Certificate, I’m going to explain the reasons for this, when you need an SSL Certificate and when you do not, and also explain how to get one.

Online security is vitally important, in a world of credit card fraud and identity theft people need to be more and more vigilant when divulging their private details. Having the padlock symbol at the bottom of a page gives people a feeling of some security at least, this means the site is using an SSL Certificate so communication between the user and the website should not be able to be viewed by anyone else. This is because it is encoded when it is sent, as opposed to sent in plain text in packets that could be viewed by anyone the data passes through. When this could be in another country, potentially the other side of the world, then each packet you send could pass through ten, twenty or even more nodes on the way.

If you are considering purchasing an SSL Certificate then you most likely should have one. The main criteria for purchasing an SSL Certificate are as follows:

  • You are an online store
  • You store personal details such as address, date of birth, etc.
  • You are a business that needs to comply with privacy regulations
  • You are sharing confidential data over the internet, perhaps with another office etc.
  • You are in a position where customer trust and confidentiality is important

I would say that these cover the vast majority of reasons to purchase an SSL. Some examples of sites that would not require an SSL generally are: Blogs, News Sites, Entertainment Sites, Personal Websites.

An SSL Certificate requires your site to be running on a dedicated IP. Sites on shared hosting can be secured, but you would have to purchase a dedicated IP for them to run on which you could order at the same time. SSL Certificates are reasonably inexpensive, any business should be able to afford one as the cost over a year works out at just a few pounds a month for a basic one. To order an SSL Certificate some basic information would be required by your host, these are the details that NetHosted require:

Email: This should be a site contact email
SSL Hostname: This is the site to make the certificate for, usually begins www.
City:
County:
Country: GB
Company Name:
Company Division:

Once this information is provided, the SSL Certificate can be ordered and set up for you.