Webhosts Charging for 3rd-Party SSL Certificate Installation

[TheAlex]

Is this common? Vidahost charge £20+ a year for use of a third-party SSL certificate (their own cheapest option is £47). I've looked around, and some hosts don't accept third-party certificates, and others don't mention whether they do or not.

I've generally been happy with Vidahost, but the cost for third-party SSL means it might be cheaper for me to move hosts now, even though I have 2 years left before my account is affected by their price increase.

I've been reading around the forums, and Krystal look like a good option. I notice they offer a free SSL certificate (possibly Lets Encrypt?), and also have a tutorial for installing third-party SSL certificates, which it seems they don't charge for. Unlimited bandwidth is also a plus, so I don't have to worry about anything going viral on my site (it's happened twice, and in a nervy last few days of the month got to almost 100% of my bandwidth each time)!

Does anyone have experience using Krystal's free SSL certificates? Is their speed good? I only need domain-validated SSL as I have a simple e-mail subscribe form, and selling is done via Paypal.

Vidahost once helped with something I didn't think was necessarily under their remit, so I have valued their support in the past. It'd be good to know I won't be fobbed off if I need similar help from Krystal.

Even 34sp, who I moved to Vidahost from due to a large difference in costs, are now looking decent value again, and also offer a free SSL certificate (via Lets Encrypt).

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

[TheAlex]

Not something I've heard of tbh. If you have cPanel hosting then you can generally upload and install SSL certificates via your control panel yourself.

That's what I thought, but strangely (I thought, for Vidahost), they don't allow it. I even checked with their support.

What's your monthly bandwidth usage out of interest?

I can't personally recommend any companies as I host my own and others websites from my own dedicated cPanel server, but I know that cPanel do provide Auto-SSL free of charge now so I'd look for a provider that will provide this.

It's about 5GB a month, if I exclude the 2 months where it's nearly exceeded 50GB.

 

[TheAlex]

Thanks - maybe it's worth me asking why they charge, when many rivals don't. I was using Windows XP until recently, and you've reminded me I couldn't access some (very few) https websites - I think it was only ever using Opera though. Chrome would show a warning with an option to proceed. Accessing http was never a problem.

 

[TheAlex]

When I pressed Vidahost on this, they said they also offer a free certificate via Let's Encrypt, so I'm not sure why they didn't say that in the first place. It's not mentioned on the main SSL page on their website either.