Where's a good place to buy an SSL Certificate?

[Kelemvor]

Not sure which forum this fits in so here it is...

Anyway, my wife has a website with a "Store" on it. She doesn't actually sell anything but uses it when she places group orders for people so everyone can tell her what they want. No payments are processed over the website or anything like that.

Everyone does make an account to log into the store so I'm investigating making it a secure connection for that reason.

I've seen tons of various SSL certificate options from very cheap to crazy expensive but don't really know what the differences are and why I'd want anything other than the cheapest one I can find.

Can anyone offer any assistance with that?

Thanks!

 

[GeekDrew]

Read up on https://letsencrypt.org/

 

[MixMasterTang]

The main thing is to get one from a trusted source otherwise people visiting the page may possibly get SSL issues if they haven't updated their root certificate chain in a while. So some of the cheap ones may work for the most part they may display a non-trusted cert message for some people using older O/S's and the like.

 

[RossMAN]

Research research research and more research

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1548934

 

[John Connor]

I use StartSSL (which is free) and Lets Encrypt which should be in your cPanel.

If you use CloudFlare, I guess they can issue one too.

Note: When I tried Lets Encrypt in cPanel they made a HEAD request to the site. Since I block HEAD it didn't work to issue a Cert. I temp removed the htaccess HEAD block and got the Cert. Waited the three months until renew and I was still renewed even after placing my HEAD block back in htaccess. So that's good to know.

 

[Kaido]

Namecheap is great:

https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates.aspx

Back when I was doing web development full-time, I hosted 70+ domains with them. No complaints. I only have a dozen or so web clients now, but I Namecheap for domains, SSL certs, etc., and they are great. If you want to dig into the technical stuff, they have a great FAQ here:

https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/category.aspx/38/ssl-certificates-faq

Note: be sure to enable 2FA on your account!

 

[Kelemvor]

One other thing I forgot to mention is that I'm currently on a shared host (hostpc.com) and they said I need to get a dedicated IP in order to use an SSL cert. Does that sound normal? Seems legit but I've never used an SSL cert on a personal domain before.

Thanks.

 

[John Connor]

As far as I know, you don't need a dedicated IP for a SSL Cert if the Cert uses SNI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

You should also be able to have your host give you a dedicated IP as well which should not cost over $2 extra a month.

 

[John Connor]

Once you do get a Cert, check it's grade here: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Pretty laughable that my site is grade A+ and this site is just an A. I think if this site wants A+ they need to flip on HSTS

 

[dave_the_nerd]

One other thing I forgot to mention is that I'm currently on a shared host (hostpc.com) and they said I need to get a dedicated IP in order to use an SSL cert. Does that sound normal? Seems legit but I've never used an SSL cert on a personal domain before.

Thanks.

That isn't technically true - you can do ssl certs on virtual hosts that share an IP.

But it might not be how hostpc does things. (Either due to process limitations, limitations of their automation/config management software, or intentional market segmentation.)