http://playnice.ly/blog/feed/

Thank you very much – I am pleased it was useful. The SSL overhead on the server is generally minimal (certainly in comparison to the processing needed by the web-app), but there is an overhead for the browser too. I would take a quick google around, but I found this StackOverflow post which had seemed to have a well informed answer:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548029/how-much-overhead-does-ssl-impose

But it looks like the overheads that there are can be worked around. Personally, I would enable SSL for the whole site in order to protect against session stealing.

Best,

Adam

I am a bit late to the party but nonetheless: great write-up! Thanks for sharing. I am hosting two Django sites on a Linode VPS and I want to enable ssl only for login to keep overall performance reasonable. I am still researching how to do that. Is it worth the trouble? How is performance if ssl is enabled for the whole site (medium traffic)? Of course, I could eat the pudding to be in the know but I was wondering what your experiences are with this.

Merchant services

Been there, done that. I’ve tried it both ways (PayPal and Merchant Account).

PAYPAL IS THE ANSWER

You can set-up your PayPal account, create custom buttons and customize check-out page and even take care of shipping calculations (all optional) and start taking payments in one work day.

If you don’t have a PayPal account currently. The only thing that takes time is waiting for PayPal to verify your bank account if you didn’t already have one set-up. That takes up to 2 days I believe.

You deal with ONE company, PayPal; Not 5: The Merchant, Discover, American Express, Visa, Mastercard, The Payment Gateway not to mention monthly fees for each of these and the loads of junkmail and besides all that do you really want to be liable for every customers’ credit card information?

HECK NO!

Anything else is UTTER SUICIDE! I’m not going to go into details,there’s just way too many. Just trust me, I’ve been there.

I LOVE PayPal. I see lots of clients who automatically and erroneously think that PayPal is for babies and small-timers and it just won’t cut it for them. They think they need a very complicated and bureaucratic EXPENSIVE MERCHANT ACCOUNT with Authorize.net or some other poorly run, CRAPPY payment system because they want to be perceived as a SERIOUS PLAYER. I say have fun with that and I’ll see you back here in a month or so..

This is my 2¢.

If you’re thinking about doing an merchant account with someone other than PayPal, email me and I can give you a whole dollar’s worth of reasons why NOT.

andrew@pixelpads.com

If you prefer to call: 801-589-1617

~Andrew

For example, CheddarGetter has recently announced that next month it will roll out a new Quick Start Wizard to make the whole set-up process easier. It’s also just developed a new hosted payment pages option, which will allow you to simply plug in your pricing plan information, merchant account solution, and a few other parameters and then your live billing site will be up and running. But even if you use this option, their fully-documented API will still be available, which can help make your billing system perfectly tailored to your app. And finally, CheddarGetter’s offering a new plan specifically for start-ups, which allows for unlimited customers and transactions, great support, and full access to the new set up wizard and hosted payment pages. This plan comes with a free trial for a month, and the price is only $19/mo after that. I highly recommend them!