I wanted to do a couple of smaller posts around my efforts to obtain and make effective use of a secure certificate for WhizKidSports.com. The smaller posts will let me expand on some of the finer points where those familiar with the process might be able to give feedback.

The first task was to select an SSL issuer. I narrowed my choices down to 2 – GoDaddy.com and InstantSSL. I was leaning towards InstantSSL until I found a chart that shows the SSL issuers for Y Combinator companies. This had some value to me because I figured these companies are generally at a similar place as my company in terms of size and technical requirements. Strangely, after seeing the adoption rates of Godaddy and Comodo (who runs instantssl.com) being two of the top ones, I decided to go with DigiCert anyway.

In terms of GoDaddy, I generally just don’t think too highly of them. I use them for domain registration, but otherwise I tend not to trust them. They’re a little spammy, and I’ve read articles and blog posts over the years with people who have gotten the shaft because of their policies and practices. Few of these articles tend to be flattering. Also, they have a reputation for bargain basement prices and a ton of questionably valuable products. This is something of the antithesis of what I want people to think when they see a secure certificate on my site.

In terms of Comodo, I found the array of products to be a red flag. I was looking at the InstantSSL product, which seemed to suit my needs. The price was reasonable. But something nagged at me. The only differences that I could detect between this product and the InstantSSL Pro product (which is $25 more per year) is telephone support and a larger warranty. Honestly, I don’t expect to need either, but the point was that I also don’t tend to trust companies who invent arbitrary reasons to justify price differences between very similar products. The other research I turned up was good but not incredible, so I didn’t feel they really closed the deal on my business.

And I know this doesn’t have even close to anything to do with the quality of the product, but both GoDaddy and Comodo suffer from psychotic web page design syndrome (that’s a topic for another post). In short, I’ve learned that a company’s home page is usually the best indicator of the soul of that company. Call it crazy.

Whatever the case, I finally decided on SSL Plus certificate from DigiCert. Maybe a little more expensive, but still reasonable. The reviews I found were glowing. And once I saw their instructions for installing the certs on all major web servers – including nginx, I was sold. After I went through the typical purchase flow a real human contacted me for some documents to verify my ownership of the domain. As soon I got them what they needed they issued the certificate. It all went incredibly smoothly and professionally. They even had a cool little wizard that generated the appropriate OpenSSL command to run on the command line. Not essential but nice.

So far so good with DigiCert. Next up I’ll discuss installation, which hit a few tiny snags but was also pretty painless.

(See Part II of this series here)

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