What are an SSL Certificate and its purpose?
Whatever kind of website you may own or you may want to create, you should know beforehand all the details and the important requirements that you should follow and apply, in order to have a functioning and thriving platform on the web. In fact, being in charge of a website is not as easy as it seems and it require a lot of work and commitments, not only in matters of time, energy and workforce, but also monetary-wise.
One of the most important things that you may need for building and running a website is an SSL Certificate, that you can easily find online on trustworthy websites, such as SupportHost.com. This name stands for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate and it describes a tool, which is used worldwide by all internet users as a cryptographic protocol for a website. The SSL certificate provides a security system for all internet communications and transactions of any kind. For example, a SSL certificate can provide a security system between two different machines through internet, like between a browser server and a web server. Sometimes, the SSL certificate is depicted as an old and obsolete system, since it has been surpassed by a new kind of program, the TLS (Transport Layer Security), in 1999. However, up to these days, many people decide instead to still use the SSL Certificate and they even use its name, in order to refer to this kind of technology, overall.
Why you should use an SSL Certificate?
The reasons why you should use an SSL Certificate are pretty clear. Nowadays we use internet for almost everything in our daily life, from scrolling through social to checking our bank account and other private information. This becomes even more evident when we decide to open a website, for whatever reason it may be. Therefore, it is essential for everyone to find a way to keep our information and all of our movements online as secure as possible. The SSL Certificate can provide us the perfect level of security that we may need in this case.
In particular, a perfect SSL Certificate can give us the standard information security principles. It means that an SSL Certificate should protect all your data transmissions, ensure that you are connecting to the right server and that the data you are requesting or submitting is the proper one. Thanks to an SSL Certificate, you could obtain a full security level on any kind of service, such as online transactions, intranet service traffic, file sharing over HTTPs and FTPs, uploading files with great dimensions, system logins to applications, workflow and virtualization applications and hosting control panel logins and activities. In this way, you could only win and be on the internet safe and without any worry.
Which type of SSL Certificate should I use?
Since its creation, a lot of different kinds of SSL Certificates have been programmed, every one of them with their own characteristics and details. When you find yourself looking for a new SSL Certificate, you should decide of course the one that might have the characteristics that most suit your needs. However, there are some SSL Certificate that might be more complete or functional, when you have to protect your own website. These are the main options:
- Single domains SSL Certificates – this one is used because it can only be applied to one domain, therefore you cannot use it with any other domain, not even subdomains or other domains that are issued for. But you can clearly have access to any of the content on that domain and they all are secured with a certificate.
- Wildcard SSL Certificates – Instead, this kind of SSL Certificate can be used for a domain, but also all of its subdomains. Every subdomain inside the principal domain will be listed in the SSL Certificate and can be controlled through the domain, by clicking on the specified section. Therefore, they cover more information and can be used more freely and with more content.
- Multi-domains SSL Certificates – This type of SSL Certificate can secure many different domains and, consequently, their connected subdomain. However, it should be stressed how you cannot link subdomains that are from different domain, so they are kept separated.
- Domain Validation SSL Certificates – These kind of SSL certificates are the cheapest ones, but they could still provide good security by proving that you own a certain domain.
- Extended Validation SSL Certificates – These are SSL Certificate that require a whole background check on your ownership of the website, checking the registration of your business. They require a longer process, in other to be completed, but at the same time, they are very valuable for larger companies and corporations that have a website.
