SSL certificate price drop from $99 to $19

Posted May 19th, 2010 in Blog Highlights, Business Announcements. Tags: plans, security, ssl.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve dramatically lowered our price on SSL certificates — they’re now just $19.00.

What’s an SSL certificate? It activates the “padlock” icon for your site in a Web browser, showing that the connection is encrypted for security. You should use an SSL certificate if your visitors type sensitive data such as usernames, passwords or credit card numbers, because it ensures that “hackers” can’t intercept that data.

What’s changed?

SSL certificates need to be “signed” by a company that’s trusted by all the popular browser manufacturers. Until recently, only a few of these companies existed, meaning they could charge a premium for their service. Even with bulk discounts, the best price we could offer our customers was $99.

The SSL certificate market has changed a lot in the last couple of years, though. We’ve evaluated several other companies, and we’ve chosen to offer AlphaSSL certificates from GlobalSign at a remarkably lower price: just $19.

(SSL certificates also require a dedicated IP address, which is included at no extra charge in our Gold and Platinum plans. Even if you need to upgrade from our Silver plan, the new price still saves you a lot of money.)

We’ve tested the AlphaSSL certificates extensively (on our own secure Webmail pages) to make sure they work just as well as the old certificates and offer the same level of security. They do.

AlphaSSL certificates have a couple of other advantages, too:

They can work with both the www and non-www versions of your site (such as “www.example.com” and “example.com”) at no extra charge.
They include a clickable “security seal” you can place on your Web site for visitors to click to validate your Web site’s certificate. Our previous provider charged an extra $30 for that.

Ready to sign up?

See our support page for full details on using SSL certificates, including other available options like self-signed certificates.

You can easily order a certificate through our “My Account” control panel, and it will usually be installed within one business day.

4 Comments

on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 4:46 am (Pacific) y wrote:

is this wildcard SSL or just works for www and no-www?

if i already have my own SSL certificate (from other provider), is there any additional fee other than the one to get dedicated IP address?

thanks.
on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 5:12 pm (Pacific) Ken wrote:

The $19 certificates are not wildcard certificates. They just work for “www.” and non-“www.” (or, for a single different hostname of your choosing). However, we can also sell you a proper wildcard certificate if you need one. Just send an email to support@tigertech.net and be sure to mention what Web site you are hosting with us.

If you’ve already got an existing certificate from another provider, you can use it so long as it has been issued for an Apache/OpenSSL server and you are on a plan with a dedicated IP address. Again, please contact us to get this setup.

Thanks!
on Friday, May 21, 2010 at 8:01 am (Pacific) George H wrote:

is the renew for the years after at the same price of $19.99
on Friday, May 21, 2010 at 3:16 pm (Pacific) Ken wrote:

>is the renew for the years after at the same price

Yep — the $19 per year is our standard price for both new certificates and renewals. It’s not just an introductory first year offer or a limited-time special.

I should add our standard disclaimer that we can’t guarantee future prices, for obvious reasons — our supplier could change their price or something like that. But I think you’re just asking whether our renewal price is the same as the new certificate price, which it is.