If you plan to use credit card transactions as part of your web page, you may want to use our Secure Server. There are two methods for doing this.

Method 1

Method 1 is only available if your web page has a URL with a ~ in it, such as http://www.humboldt1.com/~polson/
If you have a pseudo-domain or a virtual domain, you'll need to use Method 2.

You can use the secure server with documents in your own directory. Simply replace the "http://" in your web page address with "https://"

For example, if you have a document at the address http://www.humboldt1.com/~polson/order.html
You could make that document available via the secure server by referencing it as https://www.humboldt1.com/~polson/order.html

Method 2

With Method 2, we create a separate directory, outside of your public_html directory, for the secure order form. Email us at support@humboldt1.com or give us a ring to tell us the name of the directory you wish to have on our secure server. It will have to be a unique name on our server. Something like: yourloginsecure (with the word secure added to your login) should do fine. We'll also need a password for this directory so that you can upload your secure files yourself.

There is no charge to put your order form on our secure server, and the setup is usually done within 24 hours.

1. Get your order form and cgi script running. Sorry, but we do not give free support on this part. If you want us to fix a form or CGI script, there will be a fee depending on how much fixing there needs to be. The minimum charge will be $25.
2. The path to the cgi for the secure server will be
   https://www.humboldt1.com/yourdirectory/yourcgi.cgi
   for example, https://www.humboldt1.com/polson/order.cgi

NOTE TO VIRTUAL DOMAIN accounts:

Security Tips

Secure web servers use a protocol called SSL to encrypt the communication between the web browser and the web server. This means that a user submitting credit card information wouldn't have to worry about their credit card number being copied while it's in transit to the web server.

Once the secure information gets to the web server, it is decrypted and is passed to a program or a CGI script that processes the order form. Depending on what the CGI script does with that information, the information that was sent may or may not be secure. When designing your CGI script to handle secure orders, keep in mind some of the following:

If the information you'd like to keep secure is emailed:

If the email is sent to a mailbox on our system, there is very little chance of it being eavesdropped on its way into the mailbox. If the email is sent to a mailbox on some other provider, the message will have to travel to that other system, and it could possibly be intercepted en route.

If the email is in a mailbox on our system, and if the owner of that mailbox dials up through us to check their mail, there is very little chance that that email will be copied or intercepted. If the owner of the mailbox checks their mail from some other ISP, the message has to travel to that other ISP and could possibly be copied during its travel.

If the information is not emailed, but is written to a file:

If that file is in the public_html directory, then that file is accessible to any web browser if the person knows the name and location of the file.

If that file is in your home directory, but not in the public_html directory, then it will not be publicly available via the WWW, but you will be able to use FTP to retrieve or delete that file. Because our FTP server restricts users to their own home directory, other users on our system won't be able to get into your home directory to access this file.