A RapidSSL® certificate is ideal for the starter ecommerce website. Domain validation means this certificate can be issued immediately, no faxing of paperwork required. The lowest cost certificate available!

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RapidSSL      $24.95*

RapidSSL Wildcard      $129.95*

Secure your site in minutes with a GeoTrust® QuickSSL® SSL Certificate, enabling up to 256-bit encryption. QuickSSL Certificates help ensure that your customers' and business partners' information is secure during transmission with your site.

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RapidSSL     $79.95*

Assure customers that your site is trustworthy and secure with a GeoTrust® True BusinessID SSL Certificate, enabling up to 256-bit encryption on web browsers and mobile phones. A dynamic GeoTrust identity verification seal gives your customers and business partners the confidence to do business with you online at the desktop or on the go.

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TrueBusiness ID     $99.95*

TrueBusiness ID Wildcard      $649.00*

TrueBusiness ID w/ EV      $599.00*

Secure Site from VeriSign, the industry-leading brand for SSL certificates, provides authentication and a minimum 40-bit and up to maximum 256-bit encryption protection depending on the encryption strength supported by your server and your customer's systems. Additionally, every VeriSign SSL certificate comes with the most recognizedtrust mark on the Internet, the VeriSign Secured Seal - seen by over 100 million people on the Web every day.

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SecureSite      $399.00*

SecureSite w/ EV      $999.00*

What are SSL and Digital Certificates?

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a protocol developed by Netscape in 1996 which quickly became the method of choice for securing data transmissions across the Internet. SSL is an integral part of most Web browsers and Web servers and makes use of the public-and-private key encryption system developed by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman.

In order to make an SSL connection, the SSL protocol requires that a server should have a digital certificate installed. A digital certificate is an electronic file that uniquely identifies individuals and servers. Digital certificates serve as a kind of digital passport or credential which authenticate the server prior to the SSL session being established.

Typically, digital certificates are signed by an independent and trusted third party to ensure their validity. The "signer" of a certificate is known as a Certification Authority (CA), such as VeriSign, thawte and GeoTrust.

When should SSL be used and what can it secure?

There are two main online security problems that SSL certificates help solve:

• Authentication - proving a company's (or server's) identity online and in so doing create a sense of trust and confidence in using a Web site.
• Encryption - offering protection for the data submitted to a Web site (or between servers) so that in the event of interception, it will be unintelligible without the unique key used for decryption.

Solving these security problems allows online business to protect against the following scenarios:

• *Spoofing - The low cost of Web site design and ease with which existing pages can be copied makes it all too easy to create illegitimate sites that appear to be published by established organizations. In fact, con artists have illegally obtained credit card numbers by setting up professional-looking storefronts that mimic legitimate businesses.
• Unauthorized Disclosure - when information is transmitted "in the clear", making it possible for hackers to intercept the transmissions and obtain sensitive information from customers.
• Data alteration - the content of a transaction can be intercepted and altered en route, either maliciously or accidentally. User names, credit card, and social security numbers as well as currency amounts; indeed any information sent "in the clear" is all vulnerable to alteration.

So what are the practical applications of SSL certificates?

Firstly, looking at categories of data, the most common deployment is for securing transmission of financial information in ecommerce. However, with incidence of identity theft on the rise, protecting the transmission of a broad range of personally-identifiable information is becoming ever more important. This category of data would include identity and social security numbers, e-mail addresses and demographic information as well as account registration and login information.

* All prices are based on a one year purchase. SSL's must be renewed for them to continue being active.