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Talk to someone who actually knows certificates
Ask us anything about certificates — before you buy, during validation, or when an install will not behave. A person reads every message.
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How SSL Retail started
We spent 2007 working out whether the idea held up, and opened for business in 2008. The problem we set out to solve has not really changed since — it has just moved from websites onto everything else you run.
Back then, an SSL certificate was something only banks and large retailers bought. Prices were set for enterprise procurement departments, the paperwork assumed you had a legal team, and the whole category was explained in language that made a simple purchase feel risky. A small business in India that wanted a padlock on its checkout was quoted a number with no explanation attached and left to work out the rest alone. Plenty of them simply gave up and ran the site without one.
That gap was the entire reason for starting. Certificates are issued and signed by the certificate authority, not by the shop you buy them from — so the certificate itself is identical wherever you get it. What differs is the price you pay and whether anyone picks up the phone when the install goes sideways. Buying in volume as an authorised partner fixed the first part. Answering questions in plain English, before and after the sale, fixed the second.
What changed around us
- 2007Planning year. Working out whether certificates could be sold honestly at a price a small business would actually pay.
- 2008SSL Retail opens. Encryption is still treated as an enterprise purchase, and most of the web runs unencrypted.
- 2015Let's Encrypt issues its first certificate. Free, automated, domain-validated certificates arrive — and the industry starts arguing about what paid certificates are still for. Our answer: coverage, warranty, verified identity, and someone to ask.
- 2017–2018Chrome begins marking pages without HTTPS as “Not secure” — first on pages with password or card fields, then on every page. Overnight, encryption stops being optional for anyone with a website.
- 2019Browsers remove the green address bar from extended validation certificates. The assurance behind EV is unchanged, but the visible reward disappears — and a lot of people are still sold EV on a promise that no longer applies. We stopped describing it that way.
- 2020Certificate lifetimes are capped at 398 days. Renewals become an annual fact of life, and tracking expiry dates turns into a real operational problem for anyone running more than a handful.
- TodayMore than 130 certificates and signing products across seven certificate authorities — and an increasing share of what we sell going onto firewalls, phone systems, mail servers and appliances rather than websites.
What we stand for
These are not a poster on a wall. Each one is something the site already commits to in writing, and you can hold us to all of them.
If any of that turns out not to be true in your dealings with us, say so directly — that is the fastest way to get it put right.