Secure Communications

Sending data on the internet is equivalent to sending a postcard - anyone who looks at it between the sender and the recipient can read it's content.

Most of the time this doesn't matter, because the vast majority of the data being sent is images, documents and page formatting. It's also highly unlikely that there is anyone intercepting the data beteen two specific computers simply because of the staggering amount of data that is being transmitted across the internet at any point in time.

Occasionally, though, there is data that you want to send with more security than a postcard.  This is where secure communications comes in - the data sent between your computer and our server (and back again) is encrypted using a technology called "Secure Socket Layer" (or SSL for short).

You can tell when SSL is enabled, because there will be a padlock symbol visible in your web browser (see the image below for an example).


The downside of this is that your computer and our servers have to work harder to send the data.  When your browser asks our server for a website page, our server gathers the various parts of the page, encrypts them, and sends them to your browser.  Your browser then has to decrypt the page parts and display them.  When your computer sends us data, the whole process is reversed.  This has the effect of slowing down access to the website, as encryption and decryption uses a lot of computing resources.

For this reason, SSL is usually reserved for sending and receiving login data (your unique username and password combination).  This site will automatically switch to SSL mode for the login page, and then switch back to standard mode for the rest of the site.  If you wish to switch back to SSL mode, you can do so at any time by clicking the "Switch to secure communications" link which appears on the left hand navigation bar.


If you have any further questions, please contact customer services.