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SSL, is shorthand for a technology called "Secure Sockets Layer". 

Secure Sockets Layer is a traditionally extremely expensive technology that encrypts the communication on the network between your website and people visiting your website.  This allows communication between the two parties that is private.

 
Without SSL, devices in between your website and your visitor have the potential to "see" what is being sent.  Today, if your web site visitor is reading your artist biography, in theory, your ISP (someone like Comcast, or Time Warner) could also read your biography as the information flowed over their networks.  And, although it almost never happens, in theory, they could even CHANGE the information. But, in practice, the risk of someone actually changing the information has always been extremely tiny, as long as the site visitor was on a trustworthy network.

So, for regular public information, like an artist's biography, non-encrypted communication has always been fine, and the traditional cost of SSL was far too much to consider using it to encrypt public information.    

But what about private information?  You certainly don't want someone seeing or potentially changing your credit card information!

That's why, in the past, websites used very expensive shared SSL sparingly and it was typically only needed for very senstive data (such as credit card information) and was mostly used only by checkout pages, financial institutions like Paypal, or traditional banks.  By the way, all FASO websites have ALWAYS used shared SSL to protect ecommerce checkout pages, logged-in users, and payment pages (on Paypal).  

We call that "shared SSL" because those pages are all protected on secure domains that are "shared" by all FASO members.  Domains such as https://faso.com, https://secure.fineartstudioonline.com, https://wwww.paypal.com etc.  

In the past, we had not offered CUSTOM SSL (meaning SSL on YOUR personal custom domain of artistname.com) because CUSTOM SSL was extremely difficult to enable and very, very expensive.  It was also technically infeasible until the past year or two.  The charges to overcome those challenges would have forced us to add hundreds of dollars a year to your bill.  Put simply, the cost far exceeded the benefit and, even if we had been able to offer it, almost no artist would have wanted to use valuable funds to pay for it.

However times have changed in the following ways:

1.  Affordable SSL options have become available in the past few months.

2.  Custom SSL implemented in a new, less expensive way, is widely supported by (almost) all web browsers now.

3.  New technology has made it easier to serve SSL pages.

4.  New technology has made it easier to obtain and renew the certificates that underpin SSL technology.

5.  Google and other search engines are starting to give more, higher, rankings to websites that are SSL Enabled.

6.  Web browsers, in the future, may start adding a small "warning" on sites that do NOT have SSL   

(this has been proposed by the people who develop Google Chrome, but none of the major web browsers have yet announced intentions to support this idea)

Due to these changes, it makes sense to think about making communication private even on "regular" web pages like an artist's biography.  After all, if it's easy and free, then why not make sure that the communication is private and that no parties in the middle can change the information being sent?  Due to these changes, we expect SSL technology to be used on many more websites in the future, and not just by checkout pages and banks.

What that means for you, the artist, once we roll out our SSL offering to your FASO account, is the following:

Your website url would become: 

https://yourname.com/ (***notice the S) 

instead of 

http://yourname.com/ 

And it would show a green lock in the address bar of your site visitor's browser.

That would provide your site visitors with more privacy, position your site for the future, and, hopefully, give your site visitors even more confidence to buy your beautiful artwork!

Look for an email from us over the next few weeks announcing that we've enabled SSL on your account!

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

FASO Founder, Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic