If you are thinking of starting up an eCommerce site or simply want to secure part of your website, then you probably are shopping around for an affordable SSL certificate. A few years ago there was no such thing as an affordable SSL cert. Every certificate would cost hundreds of dollars and the ones that did not were not officially recognized by the major browsers. Today, you have better options unless your eCommerce business is significant, in that case, you are still better off using a more expensive certificate. For the rest of us who can’t afford a 100% recognized certificate, there are options. The following sites all offer certs at reasonable prices. Our site, WebKeyDesign uses a RapidSSL certificate.
- EV1Servers offers affordable RapidSSL certs and higher end QuickSSL certificates. EV1Servers is a major reseller of certificates, so that is why their prices are lower than other resellers and the certificate authority.
- GoDaddy.com sell their own branded Turbo SSL and High Assurance certs. These certificates offer 256-bit encryption which is twice the encryption of most SSL certs.
- Registerfly.com is another SSL reseller. They include custom Registerfly SSL logos with their certs.
You should be able to purchase an affordable SSL cert for around $20 from any of these sites. Although most older browsers will not officially recognize this type of certificate.
Before purchasing the certificate, you should decide before hand what url the certificate should be installed to. Most webmasters select a subdomain, like http://secure.yoursite.com, but you can use your regular site url (http://www.yoursite.com). For Windows servers, double-check before hand that the certificate you are purchasing works on Windows and your particular webserver software. Most of these certs should work on your standard cPanel based server (Apache + UNIX based OS like Linux).