Greg Allard

With more and more things going wireless, security can be an issue. In a wired network you would probably notice someone trying to plug into your cable modem, but with free public wifi becoming ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that the information you are submitting might be in plain text. And with really private information it’s always better to have that extra layer of security even at home. Since we were about to set up upgrade plans on IvyLees, I got to work on encrypting data with SSL certificates.

You can usually tell that a website is secure by looking for a lock image somewhere in the browser. If you use Firefox, the area behind the website icon in the address bar will turn blue or green. The image above is from Firefox 3.5beta. They’ve added the domain name to the blue backgrounds.

There are many places that you can get an SSL certificate these days and they will work with 99% of internet browsing devices. GoDaddy, Comodo, GEO Trust, VeriSign, and Thawte being the big providers that come to mind. I spent a day researching all of the different sources to find out what would be the best value for the price. I started by looking at sites that I use frequently to see what certificate they went with and I discovered that there isn’t a big winner that everyone goes with.

With a little more research I found WhichSSL. It has a chart comparison of many of the available certificates.

Later, I found that NameCheap was giving away free SSL certificates with a domain purchase or transfer. Since I had a domain that needed to be renewed, I transferred it over so that I could try it out. NameCheap is a reseller of a few different brands of certificates and the free one was a positive ssl from comodo.

You can now go to https://ivylees.com and know that all information being transferred is secure.