I'm in the process of programming a Client Area to manage all my clients, projects and hosting I'm providing. Included is details of invoices and payments, and passwords for webspace and suchlike. Some of that information, including contact details, I want to be able to make available to my clients online, so that they can check the progress of their project, update their contact details, and so on.

 

My question is this - how much information can I make available before it all needs to be protected by SSL?

 

I'm not taking credit card details or anything like that, and passwords would be kept secure (clients would only be able to request that I send those details to them). So technically all I'm making available online is their contact details, how much work I've done on each project, details of the invoices I've sent them, and whether they've paid or not. And all of that will be hidden behind a password-protected area of my web site anyway. So is there any need for an SSL certificate? Is it protected enough for the type of information I'm holding?

 

Any advice would be much appreciated.

If you hosting invoices, i say you need ssl, as this is sensetive information, and something i'm pretty sure clients wouldn't want accessing, and you wouldn't want any potential competition accessing this.

 

If your competition breached this, they'd not only have all your client details, but they'd also know what your charging them. Never EVER trust anyone.

 

You can get free SSL cets that cover you up to 10k (how they do this i'm not sure, there's gotta be a catch?).