

Ask HN: How are GoDaddy SSL certificate's so cheap? - zmonteca

Does anyone know how/why this is the case?  Also, does anyone have one of these guys? If so, can you comment either way on your experience with it?
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grandalf
Here's how I think it works:

Cert issuing companies are in business because they somehow got Firefox, IE,
Opera, etc., to include their authority certificate by default in the browser.

You could start your own competing service but you'd somehow have to overcome
that obstacle.

Second, many of those companies offer "business validation" services. This is
the more expensive cert, maybe $400 or more. They make sure you have a D&B
number, and ideally do a bit of auditing to be sure that you are legit.

So if you are one of those companies and you can make money just for selling a
cert, and without having to do any sort of audit, why wouldn't you? With such
a basic cert you are mostly just allowing users to have ssl transport without
an annoying browser message. That is worth something.

There are even cheaper ones that use a second cert which I think is just a
basic part of SSL. You could buy a cert and then issue certs, and as long as
the web server includes the full chain, it should be OK.

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icey
I'm using a wildcard ssl cert from them on some of our sites now. It works
fine. Their logos are ridiculous, so we don't use those.

They are so cheap because GoDaddy does everything with a metric fuckton of
volume.

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Travis
Second the posts here. It's computationally cheap to issue a certificate.
Godaddy figured, hey, why not try to take some business away from the other
players? Minimal cost to them, once they got the issuing authority credentials
from FF/IE/Safari/etc.

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quoderat
I've used them with no problems. Generating a certificate isn't very
expensive, really, and I am surprised the prices didn't come down sooner than
they actually did.

It's about time, though.

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joeycfan
Because the certificate racket is a scam.

My prime numbers are as good as Thawt's but they have the browser recognize
their's and not give the scary 'request for security exception' warning that a
lesser cert maker does.

The fix is in. It's a scam.

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zmonteca
Yeah, we're in the market and it almost seems to good to be true.

Any experience with the EV certs?

IMHO, this seems like it might be a good way to add user confidence if you're
going the route of a lessor market brand.

