SSL & Shared hosting plans

[Guest]

I've been in brief contact with my host, who have so far told me (and I'm waiting for confirmation) that my shared hosting package comes with a shared SSL certificate. As I'm using Paypal for my payments etc, will a shared SSL cert be any good, or will I need to purchase my own dedicated certificate?

 

I'm off to read the knowledge base now, as I know the square root of bugger all about SSL etc ;)

 

Thanks for your help

[boinkit]

i'm not sure, but i can tell you that i do accept credit cards and went through various webhosts before finding one that worked okay for me. I use a shared server, but had to pay for a dedicated IP address from my webhost (about $2 a month). I didn't get a SSL from my current host, as I found I could buy one cheaper elsewhere (I ended up paying about $20 for one). I'm based in the UK, but my webhosts are in the US as they were cheaper and had more add ons and support.

 

If you are using PayPal only, then you shouldn't need an SSL, but customers may find it reassuring to see the HTTPS (and padlock) appear on your site as they are going through the checkout.

[Guest]

i'm not sure, but i can tell you that i do accept credit cards and went through various webhosts before finding one that worked okay for me. I use a shared server, but had to pay for a dedicated IP address from my webhost (about $2 a month). I didn't get a SSL from my current host, as I found I could buy one cheaper elsewhere (I ended up paying about $20 for one). I'm based in the UK, but my webhosts are in the US as they were cheaper and had more add ons and support.

 

If you are using PayPal only, then you shouldn't need an SSL, but customers may find it reassuring to see the HTTPS (and padlock) appear on your site as they are going through the checkout.

 

Hi Nick, thanks for replying.. I too am in a similar boat, where my site is UK based and the host is US based.

 

Do you mind if I ask where you got your SSL cert from? And you're right.. technically I don't need one, but if there's a choice between two shops, and one offers SSL and I don't, I know where I'd go :D... Plus I may look at going down the credit card/debit card route in the future, so it's easier to do it before I go live, rather than having to potentially close for a day or so while I break install SSL ;)

[♥Vger]

Yes, USA based servers are cheaper but of no use to UK based websites - not if you want to get listed in UK search results. For instance:

 

1. A .uk domain on a USA based server = virtually no listings for UK search results e.g. google.co.uk

 

2. A .com domain based on a USA server = assumption that your site is USA based so you get search engine listings for USA based searches but nothing for UK based searches.

 

The decision is yours, and you have to decide whether cheap hosting is more important than getting customers to your website.

 

Vger

[boinkit]

well, I'm not sure about the importance of where your webhost is located. I am sure there is some significance to it, but if you spread 'uk, uk based, free uk delivery' type metatags, content and alts then it should help you over come that.

Just from my site, which is based in the US on HostGator (who are fantastic in terms of price, and more importantly support!) I can see that over 75% of my visitors are UK based. The remainder are US, then Europe, China and India.

For the SSL I bought it at GoDaddy.com and then transported it to Gator which was easy to do.

I did use GoDaddy for hosting but they kept timing out on the credit card transactions on my site (I was having to use a Curl proxy and it just wasnt happening).