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0 pointstechsupporter11y ago0 comments

Seems very clever, but I have to ask:

> DV certificates are $15.95/year per domain,

Not a bad price, very much one I'd be willing to pay in order to get certificates via a CLI.

> or $149.95/year for unlimited sub-domains.

Ouch, 10x for a wild card? Why do issuers do this? It really puts a crimp on the whole "hobbyist doing hobbyist things" since that's $150/year just to not have cert errors on a single domain.

(FWIW, I'm deliberately excluding StartSSL for a variety of reasons.)

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4 comments · 3 top-level

digi_owl11y ago· 1 in thread

Could be it also discourages script kiddies from pulling antics.

madaxe_again11y ago

Not sure why you've been downvoted - this is pretty much the reason for elevated pricing of wildcard certs. They are more open to abuse (have seen them used for phishing sites), so the issuer carries a higher risk of having to do additional management around the cert (i.e. revocations), so therefore charge more.

shabble11y ago

The cynic in me presumes that it's to make up for the lost cash in charging you individually for all those subdomains.

What do you mean about cert errors on a single domain [requiring a wildcard]? Because you use a lot of subdomains, or the bare domain/www. prefix?

If it's the latter, I think some (many?) registrars may let you add one or more SubjectAltName[1] values to a single cert for free or minimal cost, at least compared to a wildcard.

[1] Other values for which the certificate is considered valid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubjectAltName

somesay11y ago

I wonder why you're excluding StartSSL. It's no matter if you trust them as long as all major OS/browsers trust them.

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