If you are looking to run a legitimate online business, and if you plan to accept any money online for products or services, you’re going to need to make sure that your site is as protected and as secure as humanly possible – and that means taking full advantage of the SSL protection.
Siteground’s commitment to provide free SSL certificates are acknowledged by many industry figures. Reviews about Siteground.com praise the company not only for the free certificates but also for the outstanding overall quality of their services.
Basic Security
Every single day, hundreds of billions of web pages are accessed, and the overwhelming majority provide for some safety and security to protect your personal and private information. However, basic security isn’t enough to give you the kind of peace of mind you need when ordering something online – primarily when you are providing complete and total strangers over the internet with your contact information, your billing information, and information about your credit card, debit card, or bank account.
With an SSL certificate, however, you’re able to move from the HTTP to the HTTPS protocol – securing and encrypting ALL of the traffic that moves across your website.
SSL & Certified Authorities
Unfortunately, the only way you’re going to be able to move from one protocol to another is to buy SSL certification from a certified authority you know you can trust. That’s where working with SiteGround comes into play.
You no longer need to be hosting your site on a VPS or a dedicated server to leverage SSL technology.
New advancements in the world of web hosting have allowed anyone with any web hosting plan or package – from the most basic shared web hosting to the most advanced dedicated hosting and everything in between – to now have the opportunity to use SSL technology.
In the past, folks were only able to leverage SSL certification when they had a VPS or a dedicated hosting plan. Today, with SiteGround, you’re going to be able to rock and roll with SSL protection on any of their packages (all without having to spend a mountain of money on encryption along the way).
Believe it or not, SiteGround provides 100% free SSL certificates through the SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL program.
What is an SSL certificate in the first place?
As we alluded to above, SSL certification is going to allow you to provide a more safe and secure platform for data flow and transfer across your website and your Web server. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a standardized encryption solution that provides a 100% secure, 100% private, and 100% encrypted tunnel for traffic to move through your site between your browser and your server.
This is the kind of protection used by ALL legitimate websites, especially those that are looking to sell products or services. Visit any website that offers something for sale, and you’ll find that the prefix before the web address is HTTPS instead of HTTP, and many of them are green or have little green lock symbols to reflect the security as well.
How to implement SSL technology
The only way you are going to be able to implement SSL technology is by purchasing a legitimate SSL certificate from a licensed and certified authority.
This certificate is only going to be issued after necessary information has been collected, including your name, your domain name, your company name or your DBA, and a physical address that can be independently verified. All SSL certificates also have an expiration date, issuance date, and details regarding the Certificate Authority behind the actual issuing of that license in particular.
When a visitor connects to your secure website, the browser itself is going to see if the certificate is valid, if it is up to date, and if it is legitimate. Before any connection is made, the browser independently verifies that the Issuing Certificate Authority can be trusted, and wants this “handshake” is completed your brought directly to the website that you are trying to visit in the first place.
If the Issuing Certificate Authority is not that, if the certificate itself has expired, or if there was trouble along the way your browser will alert you to these details and give you the option to avoid moving forward or move forward with a warning that lets you know that your information may not be completely protected.
What’s Changed?
Let’s Encrypt is a major Issuing Certificate Authority online today, providing 100% free SSL certificates to website owners.
In the past, the only way to get your hands on SSL certification was to spend a pretty decent chunk of change on one, and then you had to renew your SSL certification on a regular basis – forking over even more money along the way.
Today, to dramatically improve the security of online business, the SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL program is run for the benefit of the public. Supported by a public benefit organization based out of California, it is a certified authority and can issue SSL certificates in an open-source kind of way. This provides you with the technical tools, solutions, and certificates you need to succeed today, without having to spend a small fortune on SSL legitimacy.
Moving forward with SiteGround
At the end of the day, you have the option, and the opportunity to move forward with a SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate 100% free of charge and with no strings attached – OR you have the opportunity to move forward with SSL certification that you pay for directly and that you use to protect your website all the same.
Both certificates are going to function the same, and both certificates are going to provide you with the safety, security, and stability you need to run an online operation these days. At the same time, your SiteGround SSL certificate isn’t going to be transferable off of the SiteGround platform whereas your public or paid SSL certificate can be more effortlessly moved around should you bounce from one host to another.
It’s up to you to figure out whether or not the SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL is right for you or if you should move forward with a more traditional option. It’s nice to know that a web host has your back and is looking for new and innovative ways to help you (as a modern business) save as much money as you can.