Secure Hosting allows for visitors/customers to access that domain/sub-domain using the SSL protocol which encrypts the data transmitted between their web browser and your website. This is most often used for websites that are doing e-commerce i.e. selling products/services over the Internet. The reason for the increased security is to protect the privacy of visitors'/customers' transmission of personal, confidential, financial or billing information over the Internet.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, e-mail, faxing, instant messaging and other data transfers.
Secure hosting is set up on a domain/sub-domain basis. Although normal (insecure) hosting can be configured to accept connections for both “http://www.webhostingcheap.net/” AND “http://webhostingcheap.net/” secure hosting does not work the same way. When you set up secure hosting it will only accept connections for “https://www.webhostingcheap.net/” OR “https://webhostingcheap.net/”, but not both. When someone attempts to connect to the wrong one, they will get an SSL certificate “domain mismatch” error.
Some customers set up a completely new sub-domain to host their secure site. They may not even set up a regular/insecure hosting option for that sub-domain. Or they may set up a “redirect” option for the regular hosting that redirects connections to the secure hosting instead. However, this type of set up can be difficult to manage and most modern shopping cart applications don't require a separate domain. It's actually easier to configure when the secure hosting is on the same domain as the main catalog site.
For simplicity's sake, our recommendation is to set up secure hosting that is consistent with your main domain's hostname.
By setting up secure hosting on your domain it does not mean all web traffic will necessarily be encrypted! Whether your web traffic is encrypted or not depends on what protocol you use (which is determined by the URL). Any directory you access under that domain will not be encrypted. However, if you go to “httpS://webhostingcheap.net/ ” “your traffic will be encrypted as well as any directory you access. The S in “httpS” was capitalized just to make it stand out. What this all means is that you can specify what gets encrypted by specifying which protocol to use in your URL. You can configure your shopping cart software to use “https” when things should be encrypted and to use “HTTP” for everything else, like your sales catalog, etc. Shopping cart software will build the links automatically according to the configuration you specify.
You’ll need to add a unique IP address to the domain/sub-domain that you want to set up secure hosting in. You can add one before setting up secure hosting or you can add it to the secure hosting set up the process. Whenever you add or remove a unique IP address the DNS information for your domain will have to be updated to reflect this change. As with all DNS changes it can take between 4-72 hours for the DNS changes to fully propagate throughout the Internet. If your domain is configured to use our name servers for DNS resolution this change is usually transparent.
Secure hosting provides security from unauthenticated access.
SSL/TLS Requirement
Applications like web, email, instant messaging (IM) and some virtual private networks (VPNs) need communication security and privacy.
Heartbleed Bug
It is a severe vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. The secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content gets compromised.
It allows eavesdrop on communications, anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. The attackers steal the information protected, under normal conditions and impersonate services and users.