EuroDNS introduces free SSL certificates to customers
news.eurodns.com
news.eurodns.com
Reading the rest of the announcement, It looks like they are slowly catching up to Gandi.net, who have offered free one year certs and other features (two-step verification and domain privacy) for a while now.
They are a bit behind the curve compared to better Registrars but still light years ahead of garbage like GoDaddy, etc, so good on them for offering this.
Insofar as I can guess the end-game, it seems like they want to offer free certs so that providers like EuroDNS do exactly this. That way we have lots of providers offering free certs and competing on features and security rather than cost.
Considering that Let's Encrypt seems to be planning to release all their software as Open Source, it seems like anyone willing to go through the time-consuming and expensive audit process could become a provider using similar infrastructure.
In particular, Let's Encrypt isn't just about the free certificates, it's about having automatic renewal and easy setup. Automatic renewal in particular is something I haven't seen from any other provider; I don't know any CAs that even have an API. I'd like to see that become a minimum expectation from all CAs.
I wonder sometimes why Amazon doesn't offer a CA as part of the AWS family of services, with an API for creating new certificates.
As far as I know, you only get a free certificate with a new domain registration, so after the first year, you'd still need to pay an annual renewal fee for the certificate.
StartCom/StarSSL has provided fully free certificates for some time: http://www.startssl.com/?app=1
edit: Title is now clearer, I believe the "to customers" portion wasn't initially there. Or I just suck at reading.
They charge for revocation, so it negates the entire idea of a "free certificate" if you can't properly revoke them without forking over money. It literally breaks the entire idea of revocation.
This was made very clear when Heartbleed happened
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/05/13/how-certificate...
There's a lot going on to tighten up the CA world.
Also I found your web management interface to be difficult to navigate. I often had to go looking in your KB to find answers for how to do simple things like update A records (Namecheap does this much better).
The one positive thing I will say from my time as a EuroDNS customer is that you do allow people to register European domains that require residence, acting as the Technical contact for customers who are not living in Europe.
But overall, the higher prices and below average service weren't a compelling reason to stick with you guys. Other registrars like Namecheap also offer free SSL certificates for new registrations and multiple DNS servers.
"For an additional fee you can add a wildcard to the Alpha SSL certificate meaning that the certificate can be used on an unlimited number of subdomains and servers. The wildcard option allows for additional subdomains or servers to be added in the future."
... so no wildcards for free. fyi.
Alternatively you could use CloudFlare's Universal SSL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/
It's not clear from their documentation whether your free single-domain cert will be renewed for free after that, so worth checking before rushing in.
Because I should really get on that
edit: to make it simple you have the right of one sub domain and the root domain without subdomain. As soon as you need more than one, you will need to go for a wildcard (which is not free).