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Comment by stevencorona | Hacker News Reader

It costs $100 for a 5 year SSL certificate. Why do seemingly smart internet companies let this happen?

Well, it's a 1 year wildcard certificate from DigiCert, which costs $595 according to [1] - while their 3 year certificate costs $1425.

That's quite a bit of cash when you're a small business - and your minimum viable product doesn't need a 5 year cert, you just have to remember to renew your cert if you're still in business after a year...

[1] http://www.digicert.com/wildcard-ssl-certificates.htm

Because they are new, have never run into this problem before, and are bootstrapped to the hilt. At least you know they'll never let it happen again. ;-)

They're not bootstrapped, they're a yC/Ignition Partners funded company.

Where the hell are you buying your certs? I'd honestly love to know.

I get SSL certificates from Servertastic. They are a RapidSSL reseller, whom in turn sell rebranded GeoTrust certificates. The result is that you get "the same thing" (by the end of the payment process you are filling out forms being served by GeoTrust's servers) for $13.95/yr.

Namecheap or SoftLayer (where I host my servers) unless I need something fancy like EV or Wildcard (in which case, you're gonna have to pay).

I've only had a couple situations where I needed enough subdomains to warrant the wildcard cert. $10/yr for RapidSSL through namecheap, most wildcard certs are at least 100-ish; I usually only need 5-6 subdomains and it's cheaper to just buy all the single certs at $10 each.

NameCheap resells domain-validated (basically, email the webmaster) Comodo PositiveSSL for $50/5 years.

http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/comodo/positivessl...

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