Buying secure certificates from name.com

Posted August 24th, 2012 in Miscellaneous Postings

I've been slowly moving my domains and secure certificates from GoDaddy to Name.com; their secure certificates are issued by Rapid SSL / GeoTrust / Verisign and this post has a quick look at this.

Cheap secure certificates and renewals

Name.com is a reseller for secure certificates and the prices are quite a bit cheaper than buying them directly. For example, the cheapest is the Rapid SSL which is $24.95 from Name.com and $49.00 direct from RapidSSL.

The good thing with that price is it's the same for both new certificates and certificate renewals. And compared with GoDaddy they are always cheap and there's no need to faff around trying to find coupon codes etc to make the price more reasonable.

RapidSSL also has a competitor upgrade process which supposedly adds 1 month to the expiry date when buying a new certificate plus the 12 months for the new cert, but I think in practise it just adds a month from the current date plus the 12 months, as this is what has happened with each of the 4 certificates I have bought so far.

A note about the intermediate certificate

When the secure certificate is emailed it includes both the secure certificate as well as the intermediate certificate.

I discovered a couple of days ago that the intermediate cert emailed doesn't appear to be good enough to work in IE6, 7 or 8 (at least not those on Windows XP Service Pack 2 on my testing virtual machines).

The solution is simple enough: download the intermediate certificate from here instead. Simply replace the intermediate you are currently using with this one, restart your web server and it should all work.