Normally, any text (such as your credit card number) sent from your browser to the web server is sent as plain text. This means that a hacker could potentially intercept (however unlikely) the information sent from your browser and read it. However, by using the secure server, the information is encrypted before it is sent from your browser. It would be practically impossible for anyone to decrypt it without knowing the key. Please use the secure server only when necessary, as when requesting sensitive information from your visitors.

The domains hosted by us are housed on any number of computers and all of them have a different machine name. To find out what machine name to use for your secure order access calls, go to your web control panel. You will see the server name in the main menu after login into.

Each server has its own safe-order site, and although you will be putting your form on your own domain, it must be called through the safe-order server in order for the form to be secure.

To do this, create your form as usual and put it somewhere in your www directory. You can put your form anywhere you want to, but for this example, let's assume the normal URL for your form can be accessed from a browser with this URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/signup/secureform.html

To call the form through the secure-order server, you need to use the following URL to access your pages via the secure server (even though your form resides on your own domain space): https://machine.safe-order.net/yourdomain/signup/secureform.html.

That would be the URL you would put as an <HREF> to link to your form from whatever page you have your visitors link from. Don't forget the "s" in "https".

Your cgi-bin dir is: https://machine.safe-order.net/cgi-yourdomain/your-cgi.cgi

-------------------------------------

Special instructions for using FormMail.cgi with the Secure Server

If you are using formmail.cgi through the secure server, you can still place your form anywhere on your webspace you want to, but you MUST use the following URL as the ACTION of your form: https://machine.safe-order.net/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi

Here's an example of how the first parts of your form might look:

<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="https://machine.safe-order.net/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi">
<input type=hidden name="recipient" value="whoever@yourdomain.com">
<input type=hidden name="subject" value="Order">
<input type=hidden name="return_link_url" value="http://yourdomain.com/">
<input type=hidden name="return_link_title" value="Back to Main Page">

It is still important that you call your order page through a secure URL in order to work properly. For example: https://lina.safe-order.net/yourdomain/order.htm.

Return To Menu

- Last modified on 3/16/2003 -