hi..
i am designing a site which needs secure forms. the data will contain personal information plus credit card info. there are a bunch of 3rd party secure form companies which ive been investigating, which i can use easily. there is also the other option of handling my own form but securing the site via a ssl certificate such as from Websitespot.com ssl certificate.

now my question is.. it seems its cheaper to go via the ssl certificate. i don't have a solid know-how about what would be best. hopefully someone out there has some good advice about this. im not even sure if the ssl certificate will be absolutely secure from point A to point B.

thanks.
r

A SSL certificate is secure upon all the chain.
Everything that goes throug a ssl enabled link is secured at the transport level, meaning that even the URL are sent encrypted from the browser to the server.

I'd suggest you to go on a private SSL certificate, if you really care about security.
A 3d party form handler might suffer a "easy targetting" syndrom, and might be under the fire of a lot of malintentioned peoples.
The fact is that you need to trust them, and do you think you can?

With the control panels now, installing a ssl certificate is easy.
There is just 1 thing to remember, you can associate a ssl certificate to 1 ip and domain only.
You cannot have 2 certificates for 2 sites on 1 server with just 1 ip adress.

Appart from that, if you can afford it, go for it.

I'll second Tripy on the SSL certificate, that's the way to go.