Which one is right for you?

- What is the best way to secure those transactions?
- How do I go about protecting the communication between my clients and the server during the sales process?
- Can an SSL secure my entire site?
- Which company or brand should I use?
What is an SSL?
An SSL (or Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate, is a small file that digitally ties a cryptographic data file/key to a website in order to prove its validity.HTTP vs. HTTPS
If a web site’s URL (in the browser’s address bar) begins with HTTPS, this indicates that the information that is being transferred back and forth is encrypted. If by chance a malicious actor was monitoring or intercepted your traffic in some way, they would not be able to read or utilize it at all. HTTPS and SSL go hand in hand as these features work together to not only safeguard the traffic between your client’s browser and the website, it also ensures the website they are visiting has been validated as being authenticated to the domain they are visiting.
What type of connections can an SSL secure?
SSL connections secure the transfer of data between a client and a website- Credit card purchases from sites that offer online sales
- Banks, credit unions or other websites that deal with financial transactions
- Connections to a web or email server
- File transfers (SFTP) from your computer to a server
- Online application login (to a control panel or other password protected sites)
What level of protection do you need?
There are a variety of SSL Certificates types that range in cost from no cost, to thousands of dollars annually. To simplify things, we will limit our choices to the following categories.- Extended Validation SSL (or EV SSL)
- Organizational Validation SSL (or OV SSL)
- Domain Validated SSL’s
- Wildcard and Multi-Domain SSL’s
EV SSL
The EV in EV SSL stands for extended validation and, as far as certificates go, these are the premium option for security and protection. This premier status does not come without a significant expenditure though; pricing for an EV SSL can range from less than $100.00 to upward of $800.00 per year in some cases for just the base certificate! Adding subdomains and/or addon domains can be billed at an additional cost which can increase the cost even further. The reason for this increased pricing is simple; the vetting and verification process the domain goes through in order to earn this seal of approval is significantly more intense than other types of SSL’s, hence the higher price. What sets these authoritative certificates apart, is the actual verification process your company will go through to obtain an EV SSL. The company issuing this authority will check to see if you meet the following criteria:- Legal Existence and Identity of the company
- Trade/Assumed Name (the site name if different from the Company)
- Verification of Operational Existence
- Verification of Physical Existence
- Verification of Domain Ownership (via a whois lookup)
- Verification of the name, title, authority, and signature (of the person(s) involved in requesting the certificate and, agreeing to the terms and conditions.)
OV SSL
The second type of SSL that may be used to secure a site is called an OV (organizational validated) SSL. These certificates can be a bit tricky to understand because they have multiple options available. The certificates are designed to work for a large organization that may have more than one website, domain or even multiple subdomains. As an example, an SSL provider may sell you an OV certificate for a single domain. If other related domains need to be covered under the OV SSL, the provider will treat additional domains/subdomains as add ons, which may increase the base cost. Let’s say you own the domain example.com, and you also want to cover shop.eample.com as well as mail.example.com and in addition, your international site example.co.uk; OV SSL’s will cover these domains as well as any related IP addresses. The resulting validation of this SSL is a green padlock in the browser address bar. The OV SSL will also include the Organizational details of the certificate noted within the CA (Certificate Authority) bundle. One of the drawbacks of the OV SSL is the cost of the additional addon domains that oftentimes need to be included. Additional domains prices may vary by provider and as this is an annual cost, you may need to budget additional funds to keep this certificate above the budget for all but the most hearty of organizations.Standard Domain Validated SSL
The final type of certificate is the Domain Validated certificate. These are the basic SSL’s and can range in cost from free and up to about $50.00 or so. These certificates provide basic SSL coverage and will usually be enough for most, if not all eCommerce sites. There are 2 types of DV SSL’s:- Those issued by a certifying authority (CA) such as GlobalSign or Digicert
- Those SSL’s issued by a provider like cPanel (a comparable authority) that uses both Let’s Encrypt and AutoSSL (powered by Sectigo)
Caution:
In March 2019, Let’s Encrypt stopped allowing certificates to be issued on servers that were not TLS1.2 compatible.