The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

Verisign's latest prices: $895 for a 128-bit cert for 2 years. Such rip-off merchants!

Thawte (owned by Verisign) are doing 2-Year 128 bit at $349.00... Trawling through my machine's 'Trusted Root Certification Authorities' - there's a few more: GeoTrust... $296 (2 years). These are much more reasonable.

Who do you use for your SSL certs?

This site (http://www.freessl.com/) seems to be the low-end affiliate of GeoTrust - I used one of their #39/yr StarterSSL certs for my SMB2003 server, and it did the job just fine.  They say it covers 99% of browsers - I assume the big bucks are in that last 1%.

If a Certificate Authority, or CA, is trusted by a web browser, its SSL certificates will be accepted immediately, no questions asked.  If the CA is not known to the web browser, the browser will tell the user that the CA is untrusted, and the user will have to agree to proceed with the connection.

If you're just doing something for your personal site, you can always self-sign your certificates, which allows you to bypass CAs altogether.  Some users may miss your secure site because of this warning -- but if you're just using it for your own webmail, that's not a problem.  If your site is open to the public at all, a self-signed certificate looks a bit fishy.

Anyway, GoDaddy offers SSL certificates for $29.95-$89.95.  They say they have 99% browser recognition, which probably is very close to VeriSign or Thawte.  (I don't know for sure.)  I'm incredibly happy with GoDaddy's domain name services, and I'd certainly use them for an SSL cert.  I've never used their SSL certificates though.  I can't vouch for how their "99% browser recognition" compares to VeriSign.

Slightly off topic (but not totally), are there good places to get code signing certificates for cheap?  I like the idea of Thawte's certs as they can (apparently) be used for MS code as well as jar files, but I wondered if there were any "just as good" for less.

Thanks!

Thanks Ryan (although I do understand how SSL works thank you :-) )

You can get cheaper code signing certicates from GlobalSign -- www.globalsign.com . I believe it is 175 euros for a one-year certificate.