I spent most of yesterday working on our new divesports.com website.  As I have mentioned in a previous post, due to the work on the new site, I am not able to direct as much attention to the current website as I would like.

Late last night, I checked our online order system to see how the weekend sales were going.  I found an order from a new customer who attached the following note to his order……

“your website seems to have a security certificate error.  expired maybe?”

 This sent me into a state of panic!  Questions started running through my head.  Had someone broken our security?  Was there another famous ComCity web failure?  Had my certificate accidentally developed a glitch?

As fast as possible, I logged into my user control panel for the website.  There, I found the answer.  Despite having selected an Automatic Renewal option for my security certificate when I opened our website four years ago, ComCity (our service provider) just didn’t renew the certificate.  They had the correct permission, the credit card, and all of the information they needed.  They just didn’t do it.  So, I placed my online order for the new certificate, printed the questionnaire that requests all of the business information (required because my certificate had expired), and faxed it to them at 11:00PM last night.  I hope they do the renewal and install the renewed certificate as soon as possible.

The sad thing is……this certificate really has little to do with real website security.  It is more for buyer comfort than anything else.  All orders on our site are received through a secure server, the credit card number is never stored on our database, and everything important is password protected many times over.

Anyway, thanks to my new customer M. Clark for bringing this to my attention.  I have renewed my new certificate for 2 years.  Your order has been filled, you got your free shipping as promised, and nobody has pilfered your credit card number.  And you are going to love those pressure gauge modules.

Phil Ellis

Buy Discount Scuba Gear Online DiveSports.com