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They always provided free "personal" certifcates with a validity of one year. But they market the "Start Encrypt" thing like you now get wildcard and EV certifi

They always provided free "personal" certifcates with a validity of one year. But they market the "Start Encrypt" thing like you now get wildcard and EV certificates for free (which isn't true). Talking about scummy practices...

creshal 10y ago
When hasn't StartCom been scummy?
- puddintane 10y ago
  Never I'm pretty sure - we run a ticket reselling website thru an exchange and tried to use the service to get developer certs for our testing site. The web site had a black banner with white text on the top that stated in high contrast that it was the developer site and no actual transactions would run and tickets could not be purchased if a transaction was attempted here. (even was using a test domain while clearly the live site's domain was in the header) They still required us to purchase some package to use the certificates on that site. When LE came up we were more then thrilled that we didn't have to fork out extra cash for developing on sites that don't get traffic at all and clearly stated this fact. I will never go back to StartCom considering how they treated us that day. It seems more like to that the approval process is strictly to whomever is approving requests at the time because I've also seen several friends get certificates for e-commerce sites that were clearly labeled as the production server and have yet to be revoked after several years of running and becoming successful. I don't know how StartCom run's the actual process and I could have just been caught on a bad person that day but honestly when you have one bad experience humans tend to avoid going through that again since we are programmed since birth to do this. Of course Let's Encrypt has been more then what we expected and will continue to use them until such time we are required to stop using them! Go Let's Encrypt - You got this companies support and I'm sure that of many others so don't ever stop fighting!
  - creshal 10y ago
    > I don't know how StartCom run's the actual process Badly. We've used their service for five years in clear and constant violation of their ToS, and apart from demanding a one-time hush payment they didn't even pretend care.
pcora 10y ago
wow, thanks for clarifying! :)
dspillett 10y ago
Fairly standard scummy marketing though. Once you have the appropriate auth level to generate certificates of the type you desire (a one-off process, or at leas once-per-two-years) every certificate you have signed is free.

creshal 10y ago

When hasn't StartCom been scummy?

puddintane 10y ago
Never I'm pretty sure - we run a ticket reselling website thru an exchange and tried to use the service to get developer certs for our testing site. The web site had a black banner with white text on the top that stated in high contrast that it was the developer site and no actual transactions would run and tickets could not be purchased if a transaction was attempted here. (even was using a test domain while clearly the live site's domain was in the header) They still required us to purchase some package to use the certificates on that site. When LE came up we were more then thrilled that we didn't have to fork out extra cash for developing on sites that don't get traffic at all and clearly stated this fact. I will never go back to StartCom considering how they treated us that day. It seems more like to that the approval process is strictly to whomever is approving requests at the time because I've also seen several friends get certificates for e-commerce sites that were clearly labeled as the production server and have yet to be revoked after several years of running and becoming successful. I don't know how StartCom run's the actual process and I could have just been caught on a bad person that day but honestly when you have one bad experience humans tend to avoid going through that again since we are programmed since birth to do this. Of course Let's Encrypt has been more then what we expected and will continue to use them until such time we are required to stop using them! Go Let's Encrypt - You got this companies support and I'm sure that of many others so don't ever stop fighting!
- creshal 10y ago
  > I don't know how StartCom run's the actual process Badly. We've used their service for five years in clear and constant violation of their ToS, and apart from demanding a one-time hush payment they didn't even pretend care.

pcora 10y ago

wow, thanks for clarifying! :)

dspillett 10y ago

Fairly standard scummy marketing though. Once you have the appropriate auth level to generate certificates of the type you desire (a one-off process, or at leas once-per-two-years) every certificate you have signed is free.