StartCom is the certificate authority providing StartSSL certificates: unlimited 1-year domain-validated single-site SSL certificates for free (“Class 1″); unlimited 2-year domain-validated single-site, UCC, or wildcard certificates after paying $39.90 to further validate your account (“Class 2,” which necessitated photo IDs and a phone call, and is good for 1 year); 2-year EV certificates for $149.90 (I have no idea if this is a good price or not, as I have no use for an EV certificate right now). The “Class 1″ and “Class 2″ SSL certificates, both 1- and 2-year, both single-site and wildcard are chained certificates, requiring an intermediate certificate, but the underlying root certificate was included in FF3.5, Chrome, Safari4, and IE6 (these are the browsers to which I have easy access for testing). I wasn’t able to find a proper comprehensive list of who’s root certificates are included in which versions of what browsers (if anyone can point me to such a list, I’d be grateful).
$39.90 for unlimited 2-year wildcard certs is a whole heck of a lot cheaper than anything else I’ve seen. In fact, that’s not much off of what I’d been paying for 2 years of a single-site certificate, having done a lot of comparison-shopping. And it’s really hard to beat free for single-site certificates. It’s an easy replacement for self-signed certificates at the same price.
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[...] discovering free and cheap SSL certificates, I was playing with some sites over HTTPS to see what different browsers would show for the [...]