You are e-commerce ready with our web hosting service. We offer free use of our SSL (secure certificate) to all of our customers. You may also have your own secure certificate set up if you need it, at an additional cost, though it is not nessisary.

All of our servers have strong 128 bit secure encryption for all of your privacy sensitive needs. 128 bit encryption is the same that is used by banks to protect you when you use your on line banking. It is safe for your shopping cart to process credit card orders, and most merchant accounts require it. We provide it free to you - over a $100 a year value.

You should not use SSL to encrypt your whole site. Only use it to secure the pages that are used to pass information from the client to you, such as an order form, or private information request where the customer supplies his private information that he would not want intercepted by anyone else.

Using secure SSL on all of your pages makes the server work extra hard to show your site, and this will needlessly slow down how fast your pages load.

ALWAYS use SSL when asking for credit card information. If visitors do not see the https// appearing on the form URL, and the "SSL Symbol", does not show in their browser, they won't be doing a whole lot of business with you, if any at all.
No one wants his or her credit card information intercepted and stolen as the result of your site not using SSL encryption!

As I said before, you can use our secure certificate at no additional charge, or you can order your own certificate, in your companies name if you feel it is needed for your companies image. Secure certificates cost between $100 and $350 per year, if you order your own. We can install it for you for a $25.00 set up fee. I will explain the difference between the two now.

Using your own secure certificate, you would call your secure pages like this:
https://yourdomain.com/pagename.html
This way, the customer sees your domain name in the URL, and gives your company a larger image to them. It is of course just their perception. Many small companies do this to look larger, and many larger companies use our shared certificates because there is no additional cost.

To use our shared secure server certificate, you need to look at your welcome e-mail to see the server name. Each of our servers use a different secure server, as they all have a unique certificate. This is why your welcome e-mail has an example specific to the server your site is on.
To call you pages through our secure server, you would use this type of URL;
https://secure.servername.com/~yourusername/yourpage.html
An actual one may look like this;
https://host.1-sh.com/~admin/index.html
This example shows that any page on your site can be secure.. just put your user name after the ~, then your page name that you want secured. You can see that http://1-sh.com is the same page as the example called securely, if you put them both in your browser - just one is secure, and one is not.
It just makes good business sense to use our secure certificate to save the big fee of getting your own. They will both call your pages securely, and ours uses the best 128 bit encryption that would cost you extra to buy on your own.

If you do wish to set up your own secure certificate, please contact Tim LeGrand, at admin@superior-host.com and I will tell you what you need so we can get you set up and running.
I can also direct you to a less expensive certificate, instead of going with verisign or thawte just because you have heard of them. They charge up to 3 times or more, the cost that we can get them for, and they do exactly the same thing.