Securing Your Website With SSL Certificate

The Internet has made sending and receiving information online a breeze. But there is also the threat of unauthorized viewing, data tampering, and phoney messages. Surprisingly, a lot of business owners do not fully understand how to use security tools at their disposal to keep cybercriminals and hackers at bay. It can be a real challenge to know where to start, when you are defending against malicious code that can damage your system and against cyberthieves on the lookout for sensitive data to sell on the black market. One thing every business can do to protect their website and customers is to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, particularly if they run an e-commerce site or collect personal customer information through their site.

What Is SSL?

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the most widely used Internet security protocol used today. This encryption technology protects your sensitive information as it travels between the visitors’ web browser and the web server of the website they are interacting with. This secure link ensures that all data is transmitted without being intercepted by prying hackers.

SSL encrypts all data before it is sent so that no one besides you and the website you’re submitting the information to, can see and access what you type into your browser. Random characters are inserted into the original information to make it incomprehensible for anyone without the proper encryption key. Therefore, if it does fall into the wrong hands there is nothing to worry about since the information is unreadable.

SSL Certificate Basics

When you visit a website that has an SSL certificate issued by a trustworthy authority, your browser (i.e. Internet Explorer®, Firefox® and Chrome™) will form a connection with the webserver, recognize the SSL certificate, and then connect your browser and the server so that confidential information can be exchanged.

To enable SSL on your site, you need to get an SSL Certificate that identifies you and install it on your web server. The SSL certificate must also be digitally signed by another trusted root certificate to prove that the SSL certificate provider can be trusted. Business owners can get standard and extended certificates along with tools to manage multiple certificates or security challenges.

Steps For Getting A SSL Certificate

Once you have selected Certification Authority vendor, send a request for certification and pay for the certificate.

Every CA will provide a Certification Practice Statement (CPS) with more specific information about their verification process and how long it will take to receive approval, depending on the complexity of your organization and the type of certification applied for. Business owners then have to go through various stages of vetting before they can install the certificate on their site and connect to a secure server on the web.

When the SSL Certificate is installed properly, you can access a site instantly by changing the URL from http:// to https://. The secure connection happens instantly and technically.

How Can Consumers Tell if a Website is Certified?

SSL is a transparent protocol which requires no interaction from the end user. Users can verify whether the web address in their browser displays a padlock, or, in the case of Extended Validation SSL, if there is both a padlock and a green bar. This assures visitors that the site is SSL certified and that your connection is automatically secured.

How Can SSL Be Used For Business?  

The most common applications of SSL are to secure payment transactions, system logins, email, data transfer, and any other sensitive data exchanged online.

If your organization has to comply with regional, national or international regulations, such as Payment Card Industry compliance, on data privacy and security then you will need an SSL certificate with the proper encryption. EV SSL provides advanced security measures to deal with the bigger risks that come with e-commerce today.

SSL is critical for protecting sensitive information such as customer names, phone numbers, addresses and credit card numbers. It also defends your site from malware and prevents malvertising from eating into your resources.

SSL secures webmail and helps establish secure connection between an email client such as Microsoft Outlook and an email server such as Microsoft Exchange.

SSL can also be used to secure intranet based traffic such as internal networks, extranets, and database connections. It also helps transfer of files over https and FTP(s) services safely.

Future-Proof Your Site With SSL Certificate

Online businesses can gain and retain their customer’s trust by getting SSL certification.  Lunarpages offers free dedicated  SSL certificate  and dedicated IP’s with all of our business plans or you can get a Dedicated SSL certificate on your account. Shared SSL certificate will function only with HTML, and cgi/perl based documents/scripts/carts but it will not work with ASP, JSP or PHP pages because of security restrictions on the servers. For that you will need to purchase a Dedicated SSL Certificate and Dedicated IP. If you’re still unsure about how SSL will affect your website, contact Lunarpages at 1-877-586-7207 (US/Canada) to know more.