At current, 90% of the about 50 root certificates handed out together with each large browser belong to four companies: Comodo Group, Symantec (who bought VeriSign), GlobalSign and Go Daddy. Buying directly from a certification authority can be costly: the starting price will be approximately $ 300 a year (although some sell certificates cheaper than $ 100 per year). And a less expensive way would be to go to a reseller who can offer you to get an SSL certificate for only $ 10 per year or even less.
It is quite important to clearly realize what it is you are paying for and why you should pay $ 10, 100 or 300 (or even more) for the certificate. First of all you must be aware that the certificate for $ 10 and 1600 offer the same encryption level. Without doubt, authorities offering expensive certificates would prefer that you do not know this, so their marketing departments are trying their best to hide this fact.
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There are the factors to consider when choosing a certificate seller
- User support. If you experience any problems with the certificate, no matter what it may be – browser support (say, clients will tell you if their browser is marked by your certificate as untrustworthy), renewal annoyances, installation problems you are sure to appreciate the good user support. Moreover, this is one of the reasons why you might be willing to buy a more expensive certificate. In most cases, the certificates will be resold by your hosting provider, and as practice shows, these provide a higher level of user support as they need a hosting client like you.
- Single-domain, multi-domain, wildcard, multisubdomain certificates. The cheapest certificates are usually single domain. Though it may not sound like something bad, but always bear in mind: this means that if you buy a certificate at meadowlarktravel.com, then it will be useless for www.meadowlarktravel.com and conversely. For this reason, try to avoid purchasing single-domain certificates, although this can be a good choice for extremely budgetary solutions (at any moment you can set the redirects for the corresponding domain).
- Avoid chained root certificates. Creating a certificate chain is common practice, which means that you actually need several certificates to ensure a secure connection. But chain certificates require additional effort during installation that is why it would be reasonable to spend a little more money to buy a certificate that relies upon one root certificate. It is often very difficult or even impossible to figure out what you are getting, and this is one more cause to search for good user support. If you wonder if the root certificate is chained, and they cannot answer or avoid an answer, you need to look elsewhere indeed.
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