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I manage a website for a non-profit organization. The site will allow people to make donations for the cause. Is purchasing an SSL certificate for this site a good idea? How much will it cost?

10 Answers 10

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It all depends on how you set it up. If you use PayPal and have visitors go to the PayPal website to enter their credit card number, you do not need an SSL certificate. But if you have visitors enter their credit card number directly on your site, you absolutely need an SSL certificate. Certificates can cost from $10 to $1500 dollars depending on the type and who you get them from.

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    +1 — if nothing confidential (like payment credentials) is entered on a page served over HTTP or submitted to a page served over HTTP then you are fine.
    – Quentin
    Dec 16, 2010 at 7:55
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If you are going to handle money, you should use encryption.

That means SSL certificates.

As for costs - see this question and answers on webmasters.

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The short answer: NO.

The long answer:

If You are only going to redirect them to some third party site (PayPal or something) to collect donations, there is little need to have a SSL certificate. If You publish a bank account and ask to make a transfer, there is little need too.

You should have a SSL certificate if You ask someone to send important/private (credit cards numbers, addresses, phone numbers) data.

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Yes...you should have a certificate for such a site. If you are taking donations directly then you should go for a highly secure certificate. Otherwise, for paypal, you can have a standard certificate, because even paypal recommends to have a ssl installed. The cost will depend upon your need. I got it from rapidsslonline.com. You can check out the same.

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Updated answer for 2018

For the most part, every modern website should have an SSL certificate and be using HTTPS for the following reasons:

So there are a lot of good reasons to have an SSL certificate, but "because you take donations" doesn't really factor into the decision. The exception is if you are taking credit cards directly rather than using a third party, in which case you would need to be PCI-DSS compliant and you would probably be reading the compliance documents instead of asking here.

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Even though it is a donation site, you must professionally setup the site so that it does not look like a bogus site. Therefore, I still believe you still need to have SSL, regardless of whether you are using PayPal or not.

In case you like to purchase an SSL, you can try http://domreg.asphostserver.com. Please remember that it is far more important to have a professionally secured site, rather than to save $60.00 per year for SSL.

:-)

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  • I would be wary of getting an SSL certificate from an unknown company. There are plenty of well-established web hosts that provide SSL certificates at far below that cost, and these are known to be from recognized CAs. Also, that site seems a bit sketchy. Their web server isn't well-configured and, and they have no contact phone number and a gmail-based email address. Dec 16, 2010 at 12:32
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If your not expecting to make much in donations, it maybe worth considering using a 3rd party website (paypal and others) to deal with payment handling. It's free to set up (although they take a small cut of each payment), but you don't have to worry about SSL or any other technical or security administration other than setting it up, which is easy to do.

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If you process the credit card details you will need to conform to the PCI DSS standards which state that you need to encrypt the payment communications. It is cheaper and more secure to use a third party like PayPal if you are not making many transactions.

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It is consistently acceptable to have an SSL certificate, as this will encrypt aware user information, although it shouldn't be appropriate in your case, unless you are manually charging the donations.

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Yes. SSL certificates are very important to gain trust from your user's who visit your website, and this helps in growing your business

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