What are the differences between your SSL Certificates?
We offer 3 different types of SSL Certificate: Free, Simple and Extended. All 3 will give your website URL the ‘https’ prefix, showing that traffic is encrypted.
Our Free Secure Sockets Layer (SSL*) certificates are from Let’s Encrypt. These require you to use our nameservers. They help improve Google ranking and reassure potential customers that a site is secure. These are ‘wildcard’ certificates, which mean that they can cover subdomains of your website, such as subdomain.yoursite.com.
An ecommerce business might prefer to buy one of our Simple SSL certificates from GeoTrust, which doesn’t require you to use our nameservers. Both types include domain validation, which means that the certificate authority has checked the domain owner.
Extended SSL is the highest class of SSL available. It includes more stringent checks on the company by the certificate authorities. Extended SSL lends more credibility to a website compared to a Free or Simple SSL. It includes a warranty and an Extended Validation certificate.
For more information on our certificates for resellers, please see Reseller SSLs.
For our direct hosting customers, please see Web Hosting Optional Extras.
If you need to find out more about the verification process, please see What happens next after you’ve ordered an SSL certificate.
*SSL and TLS
Certificates that secure website traffic have traditionally been called Secure Socket Layer Certificates. However, the SSL protocol has been superceded by the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.
All of our certificates use the TLS protocol, version 1.2. We use the term ‘SSL Certificate’ because more people are familiar with it.