Reviews of cheap SSL cert vendors?

March 2, 2004 12:13 PM

I'd like a signed ssl certificate, as signing it myself leads to warnings from both Internet Explorer and Safari.
Verisign signs 128 bit at $895, which seems ridiculous to me.
Does anyone have positive experience with other trust vendors?
posted by the fire you left me to computers & internet (6 answers total)

We use thawte here at work. My experience is limited to saying "I need an SSL certificate" to our IT guy and then one shows up the next day. I don't think we've ever had problems with them. (Looks like Thawte is the same as DigiCert.)
posted by yerfatma at 12:58 PM on March 2, 2004

I've had good experiences with Entrust, although they can get a little confused with incorrect DUNS data. At $150 they're much cheaper than Verisign.
posted by cmonkey at 1:28 PM on March 2, 2004

I bought a GeoTrust cert from these guys and had no problems:

http://ev1servers.net/english/quickssldetails.asp

For some reason, GeoTrust allows these guys to sell their $150 certs for a lot less (some sort of volume discount). It was $25 when I bought it. Looks like they upped it to $49.95.

I would not spend a lot of money on an SSL cert if I were you.
posted by fletchmuy at 3:27 PM on March 2, 2004

Here's a run-down of cert providers, although I doubt its impartiality: SSLreview.com.

Note that Verisign owns Thawte (along with most of the rest of the Internet). That may make Thawte the best choice for e-commerce certs at $199, since Verisign's root certs will always be well supported and Entrust's and GeoTrust's are only $30 cheaper.

Digicert looks pretty shaky: this page says you'll be installing your certificate plus two intermediate certs, but doesn't say whose - which makes me think that not only do they not own a root cert, they don't even chain directly off one. That can be bad news - the SSLreview FAQ is pretty good on this stuff.

FreeSSL offers a cheap cert signed by their own root cert for $39, and they're up-front about its limited pre-installation in browsers. (Ooh, and their FAQ is lots better than SSLreview's.) Their test page for their $5 30-day trial cert worked fine for me in Safari 1.2 - you might as well try that first.
posted by nicwolff at 5:06 PM on March 2, 2004

I whole-heartedly recommend Comodo.

They work in 99%+ of the browsers in use today, they're cheap, fast, and not annoying in the ordering process.

I typically order 3-4 certificates a month for customers, those all used to be from Verisign (and occasionally Thawte before Verisign bought them). These days they're almost all from Comodo...
posted by togdon at 8:14 AM on March 3, 2004

I second togdon's recommendation of Comodo. They're cheap, easy, and work seamlessly. I've stopped feeding the VeriSign/Network Solutions monster entirely. Hooray!
posted by maniactown at 10:19 AM on March 3, 2004