Ask HN: For a startup which SSL certificate authority would you recommend & why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3415115

by skrish • 15 years ago

8 7 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am trying to find a trusted & not too expensive SSL certificate authority with wild card support for multiple subdomains.

This is what I found so far:

DigitCert - Seems to be a good option. Their support & ratings seems quite good based on reviews. $595 for their unlimited wildcard plus certificate.

Thawte - Comparatively higher price compared to Digicert. Not sure how their support is.

Verisign - Submitted request to find which plan of theirs supports wild card certification.

Comodo - Cheaper but several issues were reported even recently in HN few months back - especially the issue in Iran where their Private key was released.

Godaddy - We do not want to go near it anyway.

Your recommendations for any good providers who are priced much lower for startups will be very helpful. Thanks!

Benares• 15 years ago

I have used StartCom for a few years, and have had positive experiences every time I needed to contact a person for help. They seem to be an ethical company.

marshray2• 15 years ago

I'll probably be downvoted for this, but if I were you I would try to avoid getting wildcard certs.

Once you have a wildcard cert, you'll find all kinds of places you want to start using it...the web site, the production system, the blog, the mail server, the remote access server, and so on. But effectively they mean that if, say, your blog gets pwned, then everything in your production is pwned and has to be revoked and re-certificated (and the security advisory is much uglier).

Find an inexpensive one of the top 10 CAs (other than GoDaddy of course) - it hardly matters which. IMHO there's no reason you should have to pay per-server for a cert. It makes disappointingly little difference who you go with on the server side, especially if you generate your own keys and CSR, then the CA never even sees your private key.

Comodo's private key was not hacked. They did issue some fraudulent certs through hacked resellers, but that compromised the security of all users equally.

skrish• 15 years ago

Thanks. For my SAAS app where I need to issue <<customername>>.<<mydomain>>.com it will be very expensive to start with if I do not go for wildcard.

I understand the risk & re-certification issue and will look into this further.

marshray2• 15 years ago

You should fully understand the same-origin implications of such a design before deploying it.

For example, if <<customername>> is able to set cookies or run script (e.g., via XSS), they will be able to set cookies that affect everything under <<mydomain>>.com. Under some circumstances they will even be able to read back the values.

Here's a good site to keep you awake at night: http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/10/http-cookies-or-how-not-...

girishm• 15 years ago

At freshdesk we use Digicert and are quite happy with them.No major problems in setting up or ongoing maintenance. Whenever we needed support they have responded promptly. Would gladly recommend them.

dawson• 15 years ago

We use instantssl (comodo) and are very happy, no issues [yet].

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

With the caveat that I realize Namecheap has been getting a lot of positive publicity here, lately, I'll mention that they continue to offer low prices on RapidSSL certificates. I haven't used them, but comments I've read over the last several years have left me with the impression that RapidSSL certificates are fairly well regarded and are generally considered a good, economical choice.

As you can see from the page, Namecheap also has a significant variety of other certificate choices.

HTH

(And I've nothing to do with Namecheap, other than being a small customer of theirs.)

https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/geotrust-ssl-cert...

And if you want organization validation, for example:

https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/geotrust-ssl-cert...

Ask HN: For a startup which SSL certificate authority would you recommend & why?

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