Symantec SSL Certificate Reviews

We had been using Verisign certs for several years primarily because of name recognition but the price is through the roof. It surprises me that service can be so difficult and sparse with a company that is asking top dollar for their services. It's time for us to move on.

We're using several VeriSign certs and have found the purchase and renewal process to be easier than any of the other companies we've used in the past. Thawte was by far the most difficult. However, know what you want if it's right for your budget. VeriSign is one of the only companies that I'm aware of that charges for multiple certificates if you're load balancing. That can make an already very expensive cert even more expensive. If you need the name and it's worth it for your company, then you can't go wrong.

Having used every CA out there for a wide variety of web sites and other servers (email, vpn, as2, etc), I can say that Verisign has a very good product line for each situation, from their cheapest Secure Site to their bank-breaking EV Pro. Offlate, they have been suffering from a loss in market share because of numerous other players in the market. For most end-users, there is really no difference in a cheap class 2 godaddy cert that costs $19 to a verisign secure site class 3 cert that costs $399. Heavy users can get good discounts, though - using their Managed PKI products. IN the last few years, they changed their ROOT and Intermediate CA certs too many times - and this has caused some concerns. It is mostly bad timing but some of the changes could have been avoided by Verisign. Symantec bought Verisign's SSL business recently. Hopefully, they will continue to provide the same level of service or better it.

Well in the past we always bought VeriSign but now if we want to place an order and pay on invoice, we have to order from Switzerland, not the UK. We can still pay to a UK bank account but this seems very suspect from an issuer of certificates. Is this to avoid the VAT?

I've had to deal with Verisign in one way another from now back through when they were Network Solutions and further back when they were InterNIC. The only reason I'm still a reluctant customer is because of my client's preference. In all that time they've never understood the meaning of customer service. At first they had a god complex. Then they were made commercial and got very rich very fast. Then they started losing customers when competitors were allowed in the market. They reacted by turning their wealth into aggressive marketing - both in new ads and harassing the customers they already had. They responded to lost earnings by raising prices even higher. They touted their browser support relentlessly for years, cornering the market on people who still use IE 4.. but even that failed miserably when their root certificate expired and EVERY WEB SITE IN THE WORLD who used them had to install a hack cert to keep errors from popping up for users. To this day they continue to raise prices and harass their customers, spending millions of dollars on name recognition. Verisign the best, verisign the only, verisign the first.. well sadly verisign is simply the worst. They don't like people and they don't know how to spend their money.