Apologies for any strange warning notices you may have seen recently. The fotoLibra website has been secure since we started 14 years ago, but last month we saw warning signals asking us if we were sure we wanted to go any further exploring this ‘untrustworthy’ site.

The site is secure, safe and solid. So what was the problem?

In order to be classed as safe and secure, a website that trades online has to have an SSL Certificate. This stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and we have to buy this certificate from a Certificate Authority after we’ve proved that we exist, that we are a real company, that we are legitimate, that we are solvent, that we are established, that we are registered with our national authorities etcetera.

We buy our SSL Certificate from a British company, 123-Reg.co.uk, and we have to renew it every two years. We renewed it last year, on 25th August 2017, for two years.

Three weeks ago our certificate was revoked. 123-Reg.co.uk denied all knowledge of it, saying the fault must be with our servers, and that our account was up-to-date and in good standing. We went frantic, checking our servers, our server farm, our domain names, everything.

It was 123-Reg.co.uk’s fault after all. They arbitrarily revoked our two year certificate after less than a year.

By cancelling our paid-for SSL certificate 123-Reg rendered our trading website untrustworthy in the eyes of the public and therefore unusable for seven days.

After a week of complaints they supplied us with a new SSL Certificate, so the warning signs have now gone away, and once again we are a Trustworthy Site.

We told them we would be looking for compensation. They refused to even consider compensation.

That’s no problem. We just write a letter to the MD telling him that if we don’t get satisfaction we’ll take them to court. We’ll let the law decide.