Recently I’ve been setting up a few ordering systems and as part of that I’ve done quite a bit of research about accepting credit cards and setting up a secure site. This post has a few tidbits of information I’ve picked up along the way. I’ll be writing a more detailed post about accepting credit cards over the next few weeks.

The Green Bar

A few years back, the average person was trained to look for “the lock” to make sure that a site is secure. Now it is going a step further and people are trained to look for “the green bar”. Basically in browsers, at secure sites, the address bar turns green to show that the website is secure.

As a small business website owner, this is pain, because the cost of an SSL certificate with the green bar feature is 1000% more expensive.

Browsers are getting better at warning

Web Browsers are now pretty much blocking users from going to websites with self signed certificates. Have you ever been to a site and it said, “This site may not be who it claims to be” and you can click, “go back” or “proceed anyway”? That is the browser warning I am talking about.

Now this is great and all, and is probably a necessary feature. However, I have a client that uses a job tracking system, and he had a self signed SSL certificate on there just for an extra layer of protection. It wasn’t required because there were no highly sensitive details going through the system. However, with the current generation of browsers, his clients would go to login and be greeted with the warning that I mentioned above. The browser was warning them that the site may be insecure, when in fact it was more secure.

The solution was of course to get a 3rd party signed certificate, which we did, and it was fine.

An SSL certificate requires a dedicated IP

If you haven’t set up an SSL certificate before, it’s easy to forget that a dedicated IP is required.

Dedicated IP’s are quite easy to setup – simply ask your web host!

Through my webhost, Crucial Paradigm (who are great), dedicated IP’s are about $3.50 per month.

When you buy an SSL Certificate, you’re paying for the name

You don’t have to be a genious to figure this one out. All you have to do is look at Verisigns pricing.

Yes Verisign have the name and are trusted everywhere, but for those of us who have funner ways of wasting money (light their money on fire), there are cheaper alternatives.

For all my SSL certificates, I’ve used GoDaddy, who are the cheapest I’ve found but also have really great customer support. One time I had accidentally bought a single domain license when I needed a multi domain license, and I rang up and they fixed it up right there and then.

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