Monthly Archives: October 2011

Same SSL Certificate, Different Prices! How to Find Cheapest SSL?

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I don’t quite like Go Daddy. So I didn’t went for their very cheap SSL for $12 / year. They are good, just not for me. I’m serious about my online store so I opted for GeoTrust (other top CAs are VeriSign, GlobalSign, etc.) which is a much more wide-spread trust brand. You should too if you have the financial option. Doesn’t make much difference to spend $40 more per year.

QuickSSL Basic was their entry level SSL certificate but seemed to be unavailable for purchase at the time of writing. At one of their resellers Rapid SSL Online, the pricing was very tempting at around $50 / year for GeoTrust QuickSSL Premium. The exact price depends on the subscription term – the longer the cheaper. Considering it’s $149 / year on the official GeoTrust website, I had no reason to not get this one.

SSL Discriminate Pricing – How to get the cheapest price?

Make sure you visit the Rapid SSL Online page of GeoTrust QuickSSL Premium from a US IP address because when I didn’t, the price strangely rised by about $15 – $20 per year from when I did. Luckily, I used my own VPN from a server in the US to access that sales page in the first place, or I would in no way know it’s much cheaper for US buyers than for international buyers (I’m based off China).

See for yourself by accessing this page from different IPs: https://www.rapidsslonline.com/quickssl-premium.aspx

For US buyers:
rapid ssl online us ip pricing for geotrust

For China buyers:
rapid ssl online china ip pricing for geotrust

Never heard about discriminate pricing in the SSL industry before but it might very probably be a secretly common practice. Other vendors and providers might as well do this. International SSL buyers should keep this in mind. Get a US VPN. You are targeting the English market anyway.

Learn how to create your own VPN from your web hosting account.

Go Daddy Discrimination Pricing – How to get the cheapest SSL from Go Daddy?

Go Daddy is more aggressive in discriminating customer crowds by offering very different prices to them. Searching in Google “godaddy ssl” and clicking the first organic listing would get you here:

http://www.godaddy.com/ssl/ssl-certificates.aspx - $69.99 / year for Standard SSL
GODADDY SSL NORMAL PRICING

However, when you search “buy ssl” and click the Go Daddy ad in Google, you would arrive here:

http://www.godaddy.com/Compare/gdcompare_ssl.aspx – $12.99 / year for Standard SSL
GODADDY SSL VERY CHEAP PRICING

What can you say.

SSL Resellers Sell Certificates More Cheaply

Another tip for buying a cheap SSL is, don’t you ever buy SSL certificates directly from a CA (GeoTrust is a CA, Rapid SSL Online is a reseller). It’s always much more expensive than when you buy from a reseller, by a very large extent.

Never bought one directly from the CA so I’m not sure if there’s any substantial differences of what you receive. Probably in terms of support service?

Support is provided by the reseller if you buy from them. That seems to be the only difference to me.

Officially Signed Up with Magento Go

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I’m now one of the Magento Go merchants.

Just signed up with their Going Places plan priced at $25 / month with a cap of 500 distinct SKUs and 8GB monthly bandwidth. Not sure how much longer it can cover but that it is for now. Hopefully my SEO skills aren’t that good.

I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with the whole control panel – hundreds of different options hiding behind yet another hundreds, and lots of novelty CMS concepts that you don’t usually see elsewhere, you know, on WordPress, etc. I remember Joomla and Drupal are just like this, both of whom have many innovative ways of managing / naming things which are unfortunately not very human-friendly in the first glance. You would be empowered to do very cool stuff once you get to know those concepts and ideas but rarely any people bother – because of the learning curve – and eventually because people are impatient.

That probably is the reason why WordPress took off but not them.

Would Magento Go take off? No idea. It does look more like of a *Drupal* than a *Wordpress*.

Had quite a few questions unanswered at their collaboration channel about how to do things with Magento Go – like, you know, theming the store however I like, and why there are 2 different ways to do the same thing yet neither of them work. Stuff like that. Maybe they are better to those who pays, in the support ticketing system. So here I am.

Signed up AND bought the $99 SSL setup service (yes, just for setup, you have to get the SSL certificate yourself from any of the 3rd party certificate issuers, but they will help you along the way), let’s hope I wouldn’t regret this….