I use http://www.startssl.com/ for all my personal certifcates. I have not had any issues with the validations (once you have an account you can validate a domain by sending an email to a predefined list of contact addresses) and the certificates are issued instantly. On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 11:32 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
I use these guys: http://www.cheapssls.com/
They sell Geotrust and Comodo certs for under $10/yr. The hassle level is quite low. First you order a cert providing the usual billing info, then you go to their web site, pick the order you just paid for, go to a screen where you paste in your signing request, and pick which e-mail address to send the confirmation message to. Click a URL in the confirmation message and the signed cert shows up in a few minutes. The certs are chained, but I've had no acceptance problems once I realized I had to to add an extra Apache config line to serve the intermediate cert.
If you get a Comodo cert for example.com, it'll also work for www.example.com. Other than that, they seem to be equivalent.
If you just want something for testing, http://freessl.com/ will provide a real 30 day Geotrust cert for free, with similarly low hassle. At the end of the 30 days, you can renew the cert into a paid one at cheapssls or any other Geotrust reseller.
I realize there are places that will provide totally free certs, but their hassle level is far greater. For $24 I can get a Comodo cert that will make my SSL complaints go away for three years, which seems like a bargain to me.
R's, John