How can I make my server secure?

Question

I have a small website that I am using to sell books.

I want to use Paypal's shopping cart to sell these books. The Paypal shopping cart is located on Paypal's servers: a visitor leaves my site to complete the transaction. It's possible for me to customize my Paypal shopping cart by adding a header: all I need to do is to give Paypal the URL of the header image. So far, so good. The only problem is that I need to store the header image on a secure server; otherwise my customers will get a notice saying that the payment page contains unsecure elements.

Here's what I want to do:

host my header image at a URL beginning https://www.geniuswords.com/. . .

BUT

host the rest of my website at a non-secure URL, http://www.geniuswords.com/. . .

Someone please tell me how. :) Thank you so much.

Answer 1

A secure server is nothing more than encription of transmitted data between the client web browser and the server. So if you have a secure server and a non secure server for the same domain they are identical and in the same location. The only difference is which protocall http:// or https:// is invoked when calling the site!

To setup a secure server you will have to have several things done however. You have to get a secure certificate (or your users will still get a warning about the site having an unrecognized certificate) To get a secure certificate you have to generate a Certificate Signing Request (from your server) send it with the order for a secure certificate - get back the secure certificate and install it on your server. (This is a big pain.) Then you have a secure server. You also have to make sure SSL is enabled on your server. If you dont care about the secure certificate you can just enable SSL and call your site from https:// it will work.

All that being said, I was under the impression you could upload your image file to paypal so it is stored on their secure server! In which case you wont get the message.

If not you may want to check with your hosting provider (unless that is you) and see if they can store your image on a secure url for you. (I know most of my clients need that so we do that for them). You really dont care where your logo is stored, it just needs to respond with a secure address. (In many cases of virtually hosted sites the main server is already secure and you can use a secure url like https://myhostprovider.net/~mysite.com/images/logo.jpg and it will be a secured logo.)