Trusted certificates for free – StartSSL

How many times did you see a pop-up message “Security certificate of this site is not trusted!”? We are used to it, and most of people even don’t check who is Certificate Authority and for who is certificate issued. Just click and confirms that they know the risk. This is not proper behavior, because the certificate should be trusted, issued for proper subject (domain), not expired and signed by Trusted Certificate Authority (CA). It’s very important, especially when you are dealing with bank, e-shop, mobile operator etc. But what about private blogs and sites? Most of them are using self-signed certificates. They have valid domain and date, but they are not signed by CA which is known to our browsers. What to do if you have your own site which is using SSL/TLS and you need a trusted certificate? You can get it from StartSSL.com with no charge! Yes, I’m using them on my sites for a long time.

First you need to fulfill registration form with your own data. After data verification you will receive verification code to your email and you will be able to authenticate on StartSSL site. Personal certificate will be automatically installed in your browser. Good practice is to make a backup of it (export). How to do this export (backup) you can find in FAQ on StartSSL site. Next step is domain validation. To do this you will need email (or alias): postmaster@your.domain.com, webmaster@your.domain.com or hostmaster@your.domain.com. You can choose one to which verification code will be send. Then, after validation you will be able to generate new certificate for website, mail server, jabber etc. Good luck!