Recently I changed the hosting I used for my clients and I’m planning on changing for my site in the 3rd quarter as well to this great hosting company [at least so far]. Something I have learnt in the world of Internet marketing and Website Design is to never give full praise to one party until you have been in bed for at least 3 years. I have total love and respect for the local web hosts here in Harare, Zimbabwe but my ambitions and requirements were just overboard and I felt I couldn’t satisfy these urges with them especially SSL certificate.

When I started out Webnames Zim & Webdev “cough cough” helped me get started to were I currently am right now. Tech support is a very important section for a company that deals with clients daily hence my decision to leave the later and stick with just the names locally. Would refer any aspiring web designer in Zimbabwe or anyone intending to have a web hosting package at cheap prices to visit Webnames and see their promotions. As time went by I started to require stuff like SSL certificates, 24 hour “instant” support, bigger site storage and 99.999% up-time for client sites. Some of these things could not just be found locally, so i switched to Siteground. This switch is the reason for this article as I have grown to love the packages they offer as well as the easy to use cpanel and integrated SSL certificates.

SSL Certificate? What is that

An SSL certificate serves as a digital “passport” that allows data to be transmitted over secure networks – protecting financial and credit card transactions, signups, web access to mail, sensitive information and intranets. It authenticates and encrypts the data transferred through the website to the server. – Siteground

Now that I have given you a definition of an SSL certificate let me explain why every website requires this. Google as of 2015 started ranking sites with SSL certificates above those without on search results, this might sound like a catch but a year later the results are starting to show the trend.

Besides getting higher ranks on search results a SSL certificate brings security for websites with Login or that collect client information (e-commerce). With the widespread articles about sites being hacked an SSL certificate helps protect against such malicious acts. In 2015 some huge Zimbabwean governmental institutions had blackouts on their websites and some were hacked, had they put up an SSL certificates the attacks would have been avoided.

Prale Web Studio so far has had over 4 clients on the SSL certificates for their websites and the traffic has increased on these website, here is a casing point – Demonstrative research. As for now this site does not take any user information or use any login but in the case the client wants to add such features we already setup to introduce them in full force. A research was done at our new offices to ask if someone would rather prefer a site with a green padlock or one without and the results were not so astonishing as 73% chose to visit a site with a padlock compared to that without.

So far in the article you might be asking why doesn’t PWS have an SSL certificate, or why doesn’t your favorite website have one either. For us we haven’t changed the host yet, when we do you will see the famous green padlock, as for others we can’t speak for them but can surely say that in the coming yes more and more of them will join the ship.

Get in touch with us and let us provide you a quality hosting experience.