SSL Certificates

Digital Certificates are pretty common, but you don't end up buying them and installing them very often unless your an ISP.

Veri$ign used to be the de facto source for digital certificates. In my opinion, Veri$ign has no customer support and their products are all over priced. As an example, a 128 bit certificate from Veri$ign is $895 for one year, $1595 for two years. The same type of certificate from GeoTrust is $169 and $296 .

The exact same product!

GeoTrust is a very cost effective, reliable source of digital certificates for businesses. Their technical support is good and they are not deceptive in how they market their products.

We completed the purchase, install and testing of a cert from GeoTrust. Everything went off without a hitch and we had the cert in ~15-20 minutes. A 'pro' cert from Veri$ign takes two days. In addition, GeoTrust let's you 'transfer' a cert. If you have an existing cert you can give a URL or paste a certificate data when you purchase a cert from Geotrust. They reduce the cert price to $119 and they extend the certificate expiration by the number of months left on your existing cert.

They validate the cert two ways, sending an e-mail to one of the domain registration accounts (another reason for companies NOT to have third parties register domain names in their behalf) and with a phone call. The phone call is automated, you must enter a four digit code which is displayed during the registration process and record your name (through the phone).

Other companies have a more manual process (FAX, human intervention,etc) which may be more through, but takes 2-5 working days which can cause problems when your on a client site trying to get something working.

I think SSL and digital certificates will be a big issue over the next few years for infrastructure authentication, remote access, email (signing and sealing) and application software in addition to secure web connections, so this is something we address in a standard fashion at client sites.