ssl certificate advice

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

I would go with Rapid SSL.  They are commercial but they're cheap.  I 
think they're around $13 USD per year.  You could also sign up for a 
really cheap web hosting account and maybe borrow their cert, depending 
on what host you pick.  We had a situation with a small business who 
didn't want to pay a fortune for a cert but needed encryption for 
assignment forms.  Rather than have a self-signed cert which would cause 
warnings to come up, we went with them.  They worked fine and did the 
job.  We're actually still using that cert even though the business 
dropped their own private server.  I'm pretty sure it was $39 for three 
years, but that could be off.  I'm also thinking that prices might have 
dropped, so definitely shop around first.  Their site is a bit confusing 
and leaves a little to be desired in terms of accessibility, but it 
isn't too bad and probably wouldn't require importing a new root cert.  
http://www.rapidssl.com/  There are two of them, one is significantly 
more expensive and requiring a phone call or some such.  You want the 
other one that's cheaper and just requires filling out a form and 
providing a valid email address.  I don't remember how to get there, 
unfortunately.  If you have questions, write off-list if you want.  It's 
fairly simple to import into Apache, but I didn't get pop3s working.