If your website collects personal and sensitive information from users such as credit card number, bank account details, etc. then having an SSL certificate is essential. It ensures the safety of your customers and they will know your commitment for their security. In this internet focused world, things are getting less secure online and without proper encryption, people won’t t trust your site.
So, if you run an e-commerce or other site that collects sensitive data from customers and want to buy an SSL certificate, you need to be really careful and consider many aspects while buying an SSL certificate for your site. Here are some of the important things to keep in mind.
Support for multiple domains and subdomains
When buying an SSL certificate, you need to think whether you need to protect a single website or multiple websites with the same certificate that you are going to buy. Suppose you have to protect www.yoursite1.com and www.yoursite2.com, you need to buy SSL certificate from a vendor who has multiple domain protection in order to protect both your sites with a single certificate. Likewise if you have to protect subdomains on your main domain with SSL, you need to consider wildcard SSL certificates as they allow any number of subdomains.
Extended validation
Ever noticed your address bar turn green while visiting some websites? That’s because the SSL certificate of that site supports extended validation. It’s a great feature to make a bond of trust between your customers. If you want your customers to use your website without fear, it’s highly recommended that you choose a vendor that has extended validation support. SSL certificates with extended validation makes the web browser display address in green color and displays a lock symbol which denotes security. However your organization will be verified by the certificate provider before they grant you extended validation.
Bit size of key
In the encryption of data, a key is used by the cipher to interpret sensitive information. The size of this key is extremely crucial in the security aspect of encryption. A smaller key means less security as it can be easily subjected to brute-force and information can be stolen. Bigger the size of the key, stronger is the encryption. For the security aspect, it is better to go with a SSL certificate that uses at least 56 bits encryption. It is recommended to collect all these technical information about the certificate from the vendor before you buy from them.
Affordable pricing
Everyone prefers products and services that are affordable. Same applies to SSL certificates as well; you should choose an SSL vendor that is cheap and trustworthy at the same time. There can be huge price differences between SSL certificate vendors just like most other things. But however, the service is almost similar if you check the technical side. So it is a good idea to go with cheap SSL certs as long as they fulfill other factors that we already discussed here. If the bit size of the key is big enough and other factors fulfilled, you are getting literally the same thing at different prices.
