We used to use Thawte until Verisign bought them and raised the prices.
Then Comodo/InstantSSL. I recently went to renew a couple of Comodo
certificates and was floored by all the different certificate offerings.
And after much reading, couldn't tell the difference between most of them.
I remember maybe two products just a couple of years ago. The cheapest
available this time was about $80 per year. It was issued by using an
email address associated with WHOIS information on the domain to confirm
and approve the issuance of the certificate.
Then I found an online reseller of GeoTrust and RapidSSL. RapidSSL is a
division of GeoTrust, which is a division of Verisign. Bought a RapidSSL
cert for under $13 per year for our Intranet site. Then, for our public
web site that handles online payments, I bought an OpenSSL cert for about
$47 per year, thinking that there just may be some justification for the
higher cost. After they were issued, I examined them and found that they
were _identical_ except for the domain names and GeoTrust brand on the
OpenSSL certificate.
When Verisign buys these companies, they just keep the company name and
attempt to target a different price strata. It's ludicrous, because
they're all selling the same product for anywhere from $15 to $300 or more
per year. If you think thank even one person in 1000 who visits a secure
web site examines the certificate and notes the issuer, or the name of
subject, you're kidding yourself. And if you're buying a certificate for
internal use, you'd be insane to pay more than $15 a year.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Heaton"
To: "NT System Admin Issues" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 8:53 AM
Subject: SSL certificates
Someone recently mentioned an SSL issuing authority that they were using
outside of Verisign. We have a certificate that is coming up for
renewal, and I want to look around at other options, but don't want to
get sucked into a bad issuing authority.
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