Every FourteenRockets plan already includes a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. These two products are for organisations that need more than that.
The two products do something different from each other. An Organisation SSL Certificate puts your verified name inside the certificate, so visitors can see that you are really you. Premium DNS keeps your website reachable when attackers overload it with traffic.
Free or paid SSL certificate?
A free SSL certificate and a paid certificate encrypt in exactly the same way, using the same algorithms and the same key lengths. Anyone who tells you a paid certificate is safer is selling you something. The only difference is what gets checked before it is issued.
Let’s Encrypt checks that you control the domain, and that is all it can ever say about you. An Organisation SSL Certificate checks that your organisation is registered, that its address is real, and that its phone number belongs to it. Your verified name then sits inside the certificate, and a visitor who clicks the padlock reads your organisation’s name and country.
If your website collects personal information, takes payments or donations, or has a members’ area, that check is worth paying for. If it doesn’t, the free certificate is all you need.
Do you need Premium DNS?
It is worth it if your organisation is a likely target. Trans organisations, Pride committees and HIV charities are attacked in the weeks when their websites matter most: during Pride, at a campaign launch, on Trans Day of Remembrance, or the day a newspaper picks up your story.
The attack works like this. Ordinary DNS has a single point of failure: overload the nameservers with traffic and your website disappears, even though the server itself is fine. Premium DNS puts your nameservers on Sectigo’s global network, which is built to absorb that kind of traffic.
If nobody is targeting you, skip it. Your website will be no faster for it.
Neither of these stops hacking
No SSL certificate makes a website harder to break into. That is not what certificates do. They encrypt the connection and they prove identity, and that is the whole list. Protection against hacking lives in the Plus hosting package and the WordPress subscriptions from Professional upwards, which is where the firewall and the security plugin sit.
Not sure what you need?
Email us at hello@fourteenrockets.com and describe your website. We will tell you what it needs, even when the answer is that the free certificate is enough.
