What is a secure site? What is a security certificate?

In a broad sense, servers are secure. A Secure Server account is for use with confidential customer data. You can access your Secure Shared Account through a Secure Socket Layer (SSL). This encrypts all traffic between the client machine and the remote server, making the communication secure. You would use this for ecommerce or for sensitive administrative logins. 

There are two ways to access your site through SSL encryption: 

1. The VSH Server SSL Certificate (free) 

2. A private, domain-specific SSL certificate (an additional fee + purchasing cost) 

You can access your site through your server cert at a URL similar to the following: https://servername.com/~youraccountname 

Where servername is the name of the shared server and youraccountname is the username you used to log into your control panel (mydomain for mydomain.com, etc).

Both the server name and your account name are found in your welcome letter.  If you want people to access your website using your domain name only (e.g. https://www.yourdomain.com/) instead of through the servername.com domain name, you will need to purchase a private SSL certificate from a 3rd party.

We suggest you try Verisgn or some other vendor (try a google search for "Purchase SSL Certificate"). You can generate the CSR needed by the vendor through your control panel, under Advanced Tools -> Private SSL Certificate.

Once you receive your new SSL certificate from your vendor, please send the certificate and all other files from the vendor to DM Creative Services. Please include your account username. We charge an additional one-time fee for installation of a private SSL certificate. Access the Order page to send payment. When the private SSL certificate is installed, you will then be able to access your site over SSL using https://www.yourdomain.com/.