The digital certificate is an electronic ID card that gives visitors/customers the assurance that your web site is legitimately yours. This certificate is a "wildcard" digital certificate, which means that it can be used with any http://www.domain.com address by changing the beginning to "https".

For example: https://www.domain.com

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption provides a level of security and privacy for those wishing to conduct secure transactions over the Internet. Introduced by Netscape Communications, the SSL protocol protects HTTP transmissions over the Internet by adding a layer of encryption. This insures that your transactions are not subject to "sniffing" by a third party. For companies wishing to conduct E-Commerce, such as receiving credit card numbers or other sensitive information, SSL is a must.

You can access all of the web content on your web page (documents, images, scripts, etc) via SSL by using the https:// prefix rather than the http:// prefix. For example, type https://yourdomain.com/ in the address bar of your browser, then press Enter (replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain name). Your home page will appear.

You can send the data collected by a form on your web site to a CGI script, via SSL, by including something like this in a form tag inside an HTML page:

<form method="POST" action="https://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/script.cgi">

Be sure that you do NOT reference embedded document content (images, etc) insecurely by using the http:// prefix, like this:

<img src="http://yourdomain.com/image.gif">

It is possible to use SSL in conjunction with other Internet protocols.