Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Cheapest Non-Free SSL Certificate

One of my SSL certificates expired recently. It wasn’t something really important. It’s only for my personal pfSense router, after all, and the only person impacted is myself, and then only when I made the rare access to its admin interface. The original SSL certificate issuer had sent only one prior email reminder before the expiry. They could do better.

But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve been meaning to switch away from them. The nice thing about StartSSL.com, which I’ve been using for unimportant stuff like my router, is that they offer free SSL certificates with three years validity (used to be one year previously). They also support ECC certificates. I’ve been recommending StartSSL.com, but not anymore after they got mired in some integrity problems.

Yes, you can read about StartSSL.com getting banned by both Mozilla and Google. Not good at all. Free is nice, but integrity is very important in the security business.

For various reasons, I rather not use Let’s Encrypt, even though they’re free too.

For my personal blog, I’ve moved to PositiveSSL, by Comodo, and sold by various resellers such as Namecheap (affiliate link). I had it free, even though it would normally cost a few dollars.

Well, I recently learnt that they do offer a cool SSL certificate promotion. You can get a PositiveSSL certificate for just US$1.99 with purchase of any domain registration, transfer or other eligible product. How about tagging along another promotion, like a domain name for US$0.88?

Right now, you can also buy a variety of domain names such as .info, .online, and 27 others, for just US$0.88. So for a total cost of US$3.05 (inclusive of US$0.18 ICANN fee), you get:

  • A domain name registration
  • A PositiveSSL certificate

Nice? Now go your domain+SSL deal.

(Clicking my Namecheap affiliate link helps support this blog!)

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