FAQ

What Secure Socket Layer ("SSL") options are offered by JB?

We offer two options for SSL or secure socket capable web space.

First, you can buy a digital certificate from Verisign.  The charges include Verisign's fee of $349 for your first year, and $249 each year thereafter.  In addition, our fee is $100 per year.  International clients are charged an extra $100 each year by Verisign.  Your second option, which is the least expensive, is to take advantage of our offer for a 5 megabyte SSL web site account on the domain of...

http://www.securetransactions.com/

It only requires a one-time setup fee of $50 and $20 a month.  You will be given a 5 megabyte disk space allocation and an FTP log-on userID so that you can upload and manage your SSL web space.  The subfolder name of your web site will be the same as the domain name of your account less the extension (.tld).  Your secure socket SSL web site account Uniform Resource Locator ("URL") will be of the form...

http://www.securetransactions.com/yourdomain/
 

Does JB process real-time Credit Card Transactions?

JB does not currently offer real-time credit card transaction support via CyberCash or any other service.  However, here is a brief list of transaction services that you might want to investigate:

http://www.atsbank.com/
http://www.commercetoday.com/
http://www.creditnet.com/
http://www.csi.com/
http://www.plugnpay.com/
http://ofs.web-charge.com/

We don't recommend any of these specifically, but all of them should be able to provide adequate real-time transaction services.

The reason we don't offer these services ourselves is because we have found in our testing of E-Commerce servers, like CyberCash, that problems can occur that significantly effect the reliability and performance of our client's web services.  What we found to be especially problematic with CyberCash is that it requires virtually 100% of both web server CPU and bandwidth while the credit card transaction is being processed.  If we installed CyberCash on the same web server on which your domain were hosted, there would be no web services available for the 20 to 30 seconds that a transaction were being processed.  In other words, for almost half a minute all the domains hosted on that dedicated web server would be inaccessible because the web server's CPU would be running at 100% of capacity.  Anyone attempting to browse to a web page on any domain on your server would receive a "501 Server Busy" error.  In addition, because it takes 100% bandwidth as well, the other web servers on our Local Area Network would also be down. 

Why do E-Commerce Servers do this?  Good question. The only answer we could get when we asked was that it was necessary to ensure the security of the transaction process.   What we assume they meant is  that the process requires 100% CPU and bandwidth to prevent any other service from interfering with the security protocols used.   While this does seem to be a reasonable method for ensuring transaction security, it does not seem compatible with reliable web hosting.

By contracting with a third party transaction provider, you will have the same real-time processing capability as you would if we were offering an E-Commerce server, but this way your web pages will be more accessible and reliable while a transaction is occurring.