The internet traditionally ran over HTTP for everything that was not needed to be secure, the data between your computer and the server is passed over in a none encrypted format.
Unfortunately, over the years data breaches, security exploits and hacking, in general, have made many people adopt the HTTPS standard. Using this, your data is encrypted point to point, and generally should not be readable by anyone that intercepts it. In order to pass data over HTTPS you need an SSL certificate, you can create them by yourself, but in order to avoid warnings in your browser you need to buy one from a certificate authority, such as Comodo, VeriSign etc
Google, in particular, have pushed SSL/HTTPS, several years ago they changed their own search engine to HTTPS, more recently they introduced HTTPS as a search engine ranking factor. In January they started issues warnings via Chrome about sites that accept password or credit card inputs over HTTP. Now they are taking this one step further.
From October 2017, Chrome (version 62) will show a “NOT SECURE” warning when users enter text in a form on an HTTP page, and for all HTTP pages in Incognito mode.
This change will likely have a serious effect on user behaviour, anyone inputting data via a form will be told it is not secure. So, we highly recommend any website using forms to collect data switch their site over to SSL/HTTPS.
For existing clients that do not have HTTPS, we charge a small fee of £50 to buy and install the SSL certificate and swap your site over to HTTPS. Then there is a yearly fee of £25 for the certificate itself.
If you would like to transfer your hosting to us we have both Linux and Windows dedicated servers and we charge £220 per year for hosting.
As part of the hosting fee we handle:
- All security updates and maintenance of our server.
- WordPress performance optimisations
- Uptime monitoring of your site.
- Essential updates to your site and plugins (if using WordPress)
- Weekly file backups
- Daily database backups
All our hosting accounts come with full business class emails for up to 20 users with 5GB storage per mail box and mobile access.