SSL Certificate (or in full name Secure Socket Layer Certificate) are no stranger to online users today, as SSL Certificate is known as giving the ‘https’ ability to websites to secure the data being transferred from users’ computers to the webserver. This article aims to help you select the best SSL Certificate for your website by assessing the various considerations.

1. Cost consideration

SSL Certificates can cost somewhere from USD$33/year to a couple of hundred dollars per year, depending on the feature that comes with it. Obviously, this depends on the budget you have.

2. “Green Bar” consideration

Cheap SSL certificates like RapidSSL do not offer the “Green Bar” while more expensive “EV” SSL Certificates do give you the ability to display these green bars. How important is this? It all depends on how you think your visitors perceive the safety of your website based on these bars — some visitors are very particular while most probably don’t. But it should be noted that banks do use these “Green Bar” as the standards.

3. How many domains to protect?

Depending on the number of domain names you wish to protect, it is useful to plan ahead and do a simple cost comparison on whether you should purchase an SSL Certificate for each of these domains, or a Wild Card SSL Certificate is cheaper — on the basis that these domains all host on the same server.

4. What is the browser compatibility? Not so important.

If you buy renowned and popular certificates like those from GeoTrust or RapidSSL, most internet browsers are already supported. The less than 0.1% non-supported browsers out there should not be a concern to you because if the SSL Certificate fails to load on their browser, you probably have bigger worry — your website is likely to fail completely on their browser anyway.

5. What is the insured amount? Not so important.

SSL Certificates are insured from a few grands to an excess of USD$1 million. Sounds too good to be true? Firstly, read the fine print: It is issued to the users of your website, not you, in the event of any claims. Secondly, the coverage: If a fraudulent website can use the verified SSL Certificate issued by the Certificate Authority (CA) to perform a fraud charge on the user’s credit card, the user can claim back the amount up to the insured amount. Fact is such occurrence is extremely rare, and phishing sites are not covered because these sites do not have the same SSL certificate issued by the CA and it is the user who has to exercise the due diligence.

What else?

While SSL Certificates are great to encrypt data between your server and your visitors’ computers, there are more important considerations if the purpose of buying the SSL Certificate is hoping to secure your website. Almost imperative measures to secure your website include considering the right information security implementations, or at least implement a Managed Web Application Firewall. Security starts from securing your server first, then only the transmission of data out-of or into your server.

SecureAX is a leading cloud computing provider in Singapore with a strong niche in cloud security. Contact us to find out how we can help secure your website and server!