Gordon Hudson wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Kim Phelan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >> How and why you offer certain types of certificates is certainly a >> decision >> you each will make, and I appreciate the frank comments on the list, and I >> am keeping notes :) > > Sending customers to Godaddy would be very silly as they provide the same > services we do, but cheaper. > It would be like giving customers away.
Exactly. We need a provider that both doesn't compete with us and that we can trust won't try to poach our customers. Godaddy fails the former test and Verisign, Comodo, and others fail the latter. Note that I don't have any evidence that Verisign, Comodo, or others do try to market to the end user, just that I don't trust that they won't. > My choice of cert comes down to browser recognition and easy of management > and renewal. > We have used Comodo in hte past but they kept changing their intermediate > cert causing untold chaos as we do shared server hosting. > Comodo allow us to approve certs on behalf of customrrs so they don;t get an > email asking them for permission to issue it. > This is the main reason I stuck with Comodo. > Many of our customers just don't want to know how things work, they just > want us to make the technical and admin issues go away so getting an > approver email is something they don;t want and probably won't respond to. If Tucows could do this, we would be much more profitable on certs. Most all our time is spent getting customers to get their admin. contact email address straightened out before we submit the order and then following up with them to make sure they received the message and followed the instructions. If we could save time like this, we could sell certs. at a lower cost. > > With Geotrust I have managed to solve the problem by getting the approver > email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > which I can arrange to forward to us as we host all the domains anyway. > Its a bit convoluted but it solves the problem. A good idea, but the above would be nicer since it means we don't have to configure a forwarder each time we do a cert. > > On price we charge $90 for the quick SSL which does not even cover the time > involved installing them. > We could make more by reselling the Godaddy certs but we might lose > customers and the install/renewal system is bad. > PLUS Godaddy only do certs for gTLD's > If you try and get them to issue one for a .co.uk they can't get the admin > email address from the whois and they do not permit generic alternatives > like [EMAIL PROTECTED] so you need to fax in proof of ownership from the > registrar which presumably means the domain certificate or letter of > authority which noone ever keeps. > > Like a lot of things in this business, price is not everything. > We can make more money by having a simpler system that requires fewer staff. > We have five staff in total. > One of our competitors who uses cheaper methods of doing things has 21 staff > and only half the customers we do. > Although our cost base is higher we make a profit and they don't. > > Here is a simple example: > We put a low number of customers per server on shared hosting and the > servers require very little management. > They put three times as many customers to save money but have to have > someone checking the servers and dealing with problems all the time. > Staff cost a lot of money so its actually cheaper running more servers with > fewer customers per box. > Amen. -- Chris Scott Adaptive Hosting Solutions, Inc. | Blogzerk - blog hosting http://www.adaptivehostingsolutions.com/ | http://www.blogzerk.com/ _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
