These days when phishing sites and emails are almost as many as the real thing people are getting more and more cautious about where and how they share personal information. One way to get your visitors to trust your site as the real thing is to get an SSL certificate.An SSL certificate is the pad lock found in your browser when you visit some sites like PayPal and your online bank. The pad lock indicates the site you're visiting is using a certificate certifying they are who they claim to be. If you hold you mouse over the pad lock you see who certified they site and if you double-click on the pad lock you get more information about the certificate.

In some browsers you can also see a blue or green area next to the URL in the address bar of the browser:

The pad lock and the blue/green area don't only let the visitor know who the site belong to, but it also indicates the communication between the visitor and the site is encrypted so it's almost impossible for anyone to monitor the traffic. If you for example are about to place an order for something online and the site you're buying from is asking for your credit card number without the pad lock in the browser, then anyone can intercept the traffic between you and the site. So you're credit card can end up in the hands of someone other than the store you're placing the order at . If you instead see the pad lock then the traffic is encrypted and can't be monitored as easy.

So how to you get your site certified and how do you get encryption activated on your site?

First you need to get a certificate from someone like Starfield Technologies. During March you get a special deal on SSL certificates from Starfield at eXavier

After you've placed the order there's a simple verification process to verify that you are you depending on which type of certificate you want. Usually a certificate can be issued within 2-5 hours.

When your certificate has been issued you get two files to install on your server. Starfield got easy to follow instructions for most server types like Plesk and cPanel, so it's not hard at all to secure your site. The basic steps are just uploading the file to your server/hosting account and activating encryption for your site (pressing a button). Once the certificate has been installed on your hosting account you can see the pad lock in your browser

Visit eXavier for ore information on certificates or to place an order.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 11:22 am and is filed under Antivirus & Security, Ecommerce, The World According to Xavier, Xavier Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.