microchip08 wrote:To add to the support forum theme: I might be being an utter idiot here, but is there a reason that, to sign an SSL cert for a site, it's so damn expensive? Is there a cheaper way to get rid of the scary "The site's security certificate is not trusted!" error, rather than shelling out more money yearly than my entire triennial hosting plan?
The whole "paying for signing" thing was originally intended to be a kind of threshold to prevent abuse, but is a seriously outdated idea these days. Honestly there's very little reason companies should even charge for signing unless it's an EV certificate, although the administrative/security side of the business is some kind of justification. In essence the idea is that a handful of companies has been certified to be an internationally acknowledged certificate authority (CA) that all browsers recognize as valid issuers of certificates. Since it requires quite some resources to maintain their lists and pay licensing, these companies need to charge money. The more extensive a certificate (wildcard subdomains) the more is charged. Technically speaking EV certificates are similarly implemented but provide the additional ensurance that you're truly connected to whichever organisation the webserver claims to belong to; CAs tend to put in actual effort to validate this through phone calls, signed papers etc. and hence are justified to charge more for this.
See also articles like this one.
However, if you need the simplest of the simplest (for example, domain.com and the www subdomain) you can have that sorted for 20 bucks a year. Just spend some time looking around.
Jelco
