Hostgator Review : SSL and Ecommerce

By web hosting on Jan 21, 2006 in Reviews

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This is a hostgator review posted by Yari Gio on 19 January 2006

I’m very new to the reseller community and have recently purchased a aluminum plan. One of the key things I’m planning to do is setup e-commerce sites, and I noticed that the plan I was buying came with a shared SSL certificate. http://www.hostgator.com/resellers.shtml (check under the heading: All accounts will have the below E-Commerce Features…)

Not knowing the full what complications come with a shared certificate (vr. a private one) I clicked on the ? button next to (shared SSL) and the information I got form that was basically what I thought. I even talked to a sale rep and was told a shared certificate basically means that unlike a private one, for the shopping cart to lead to a secure address the url would end up being something like https://secureblah.websitewelcome.co…myshoppingcart. I was told that would work perfectly with my shopping cart system and that it was fully secure. I did not think that would be a problem for my clients, being that they would be lead to that url by “checking out” and they probably would not even notice.

So after purchasing the account I setup a shopping cart and figured out my secure path (which by the way is not in the list, my secure path is “https://secure81.websitewelcome.com/~usernamehere/” which is not even listed on the shared ssl page (http://www.hostgator.com/sharedssl.shtml). Any how, i set everything up and bumm my cart worked perfectly, it would switch in and out of the secure and unsecure url with only one problem, that problem being that I would get a popup telling me that I was accessing an untrusted site, but that the ssl cert was valid. I figured that had something to do with my browser or something so I did not care.

Ok now, two days later I went to test my site out on a different computer and every time (no matter which browser, netscape, firefox, IE) i would get this error, every browser had their own wording but basically it said that the SSL cert was good, but that “https://secure81.websitewelcome.com/~usernamehere/cartfolder/” was an untrusted site.

Now i got really worried, I mean I don’t know in general but a bulk of the clients i work with are not very computer savvy, and having them come up to a message like this during check out they are NOT going to proceed.

So I freak out a little and contact tech support, I talk to this man on the chat support and find out that there is no “fix” for this problem but that they only way to handle it is to request a private SSL. he said to e-mail support for this.

So i e-mailed support and they basically said I would need to buy a private SSL + pay 2 more bucks a month to make it so my site does not pop up a “untrusted” error.

At that point they lead me to the knowledge base where it goes over some of this.

After talking to 5 different techs via e-mail (it seamed that every response to the ticket I was working on would get answered by a different tech, and some times they had no clue what was going on, almost like they did not read the earlier information on the ticket).

Now I’m not trying to bash tech support, I’ve actually found them to be very nice and friendly and usually pretty knowledgeable but they where completely unwilling to work with me on this problem, other then offer the solution of “pay this amount for a private SSL”.

The two points I want to make here are,

One: I was told, both buy the signup sheet and the sale’s rep at the time that the shared SSL is a perfectly working solution for ecommerce, but that is NOT true, and I can not believe any one could run a successful ecommerce site with a warning popup coming up during checkout.

And two: please correct the links about shared and unshared ssl to lead to the wonderful articles in the knowledge base, so that one can really know the hidden meaning of the two if they are new to this whole process.
Furthermore, I would like to suggest that in mistakes like this, techs should be willing to work out a resolution, I believe fault lies in both host gator and me and I do not understand why no one could help me with a better compromise then just “buy this !”. I dont expect to get free service but I was mislead in to beliving everything would work, and now after I bought the service and have spent a good weeks worth of work getting a lot of my biz moved (i’ve not redirected the names servers on most of the domains since i want to test things out first) i found that I will need to spend more money for something I was told I had.

Also, on a note, this process got me pretty upset because during the few e-mails back and forth the new techs anwsering the same ticket would ask me questions which where already answered earlier in the ticket by me or even by an other tech, showing me that they had not read over the whole case which is very frustrating for me because i then have to re-explan it all.

I really do look forward to a great relationship with host gator though and I’ve not been scared off by this ordeal. Hopefully though further resolution can be found on this issue and corrections to the selling pages will be made so other new people like me will not miss understand. Thank you.

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