I hate shopping for SSL certificates almost as much as I hate shopping for auto insurance – in fact I think I’d rather enter all the grisly details of my driving career (which really aren’t all that much, really) than try to figure out the hidden costs associated with SSL certs.
Our first certificate was signed by GoDaddy. I used to be the biggest GoDaddy fanboy ever back when they were the cheapest around – but realistically the total cost of ownership on anything sold by GoDaddy is so insanely high really. Sure that first year where your domain is $1.99 or whatever is great, but then you forget about it and they auto-renew it the month before it’s going to expire for $16. That cert that’s $12 with a free year of .com/.net/.org registration suddenly becomes $30.
I’m so sick of their predatory billing and doing the coupon dance every year that I moved all of our domains over to Moniker instead. But now it came time to renew the cert for Sabrienix’s portal… I found namecheap, who resell RapidSSL for a ridiculous $10.95 a month and as near as I can tell there’s no scams or anything.
I was going to just pay for the verification for StartSSL, but unfortunately our car probably needs a tire, and the portal certificate expires tomorrow (which would break Google Checkout) so I wouldn’t be able to get the verification done in time. Boo. 
Maybe next year.
