GoDaddy SSL Certificate Reviews

The EV SSL certificate process from GoDaddy is a nightmare. It took months. They require either an attorney letter or a CPA letter to issue a certificate. This costs money that negates the price of the certificate. Have had to sign and send revised agreements three times while getting my CPA to issue the letter, then he had to call them on top of the letter. Truly a nightmare and terrible customer service. I should have paid more to Comodo and been happier in the end.

I had a problem getting my cert to work and they helped me out even after figuring out that the issue was on my end. They stayed on the phone and helped out, great service! 1and1 could take a hint about how to help customers by calling these guys because they are simply inept.

It has been over two months and after furnishing every little Item required they are asking for petty redundant verification from my CPA which has a cost total to date of $800. It would have been worth every penny of a more expensive SSL to not have to deal with these people. This is on a domain that has been on the web and doing business since 1995. NO COMMON SENSE, It's like doing business with a government body not a private enterprise.

We have used Verisign (back in 1999) incredibly expensive and bureaucrat. We then switched to Comodo, was fine through a reseller but renewing this year did not come through in time in spite of promise that EV cert was fully validated and would be finally generated a day before the previous one expired. Ordered godaddy cert after our Comodo cert ran out, at 2am Arazona time. Very Very stressed because Comodo/Instant SSL do not have 24hr support. The actual total time from GoDaddy Order to Certificate issue 1hr 25 minutes. Could have been about 50 minutes if we had been able to turn the validation email around quicker. Godaddy have a delay of up to 1 hour before your cert order shows up. Extra stress checking various browsers and call to support to find out why no process for getting cert. Order finally showed up, then another delay before you can submit the cert of up to 1 hour. This a little thing that you need to respond to an email to your domain name. (PANIC we registered the domain in 1999 no idea of the email). Checked and it goes to our support box, but no mail in support. Checked our CRM database that logs all incoming email, email showed up. It had gone into Junk mail. Responded to validation email godaddy cert issued a few minutes later. The actual total time from GoDaddy Order to Certificate issue 1hr 25 minutes Deployed to all our web, email and other servers, with usual intermediate cert pain, but reasonable instructions. For comparison, prior to ordering GoDaddy, I placed a 2nd order to Comodo for a non EV cert. The login to comodo is a nightmare it does not work with firefox and the interface his horrible. However since I had already been through it once, was able to figure out how to get into the 2nd order after a while, and up load our certificate request. It then went into validating. Send a further urgent support request to comodo about the fact we had placed a 2nd order. No response, live chat on instant ssl (said there was a user at the other end but window just closed with IE, Firefox and Chrome), phone said office closed. At this point ordered another cert from godaddy. The Comodo wildcard cert has now showed up 11 hours after the order and we are going to have to try and get a refund on both Comodo Certificates. Price comparison Comodo total Spent 2 year EV Multidomain ( £ 1,425.02 with tax) 5 year wildcard (£ 2,612.33 >> £3,069.49 with tax) Godaddy 5 year wildcard (£ 575.44) We will get charged more since it is in dollars and this is GoDaddies view of the exchange rate rather than our banks/card company. We always go for the maximum length because even a reissue is a complete pain. Our level of hatred towards the certificate companies is normally at this point in time. Very Very high. Godaddy have been easily the least bad experience we have had in the last 10 years. I have not been through the EV process with GoDaddy, but expect it would be the normal nightmare. Still is it a lot less pain than an IPO which takes 3/6 months of verification vs a couple of days for an EV certificate. Godaddy saved us from a further 8hrs with out a valid certificate after the comodo certificate expired despite their promise to get the cert delivered to us 24hrs before expiry, after days of stupid delays. Comodo did not even validate that we were using the cert with our domain name, and they still took forever. PS Versign also did not validate that we were using the cert with our domain name. So our feeling having used Verisign, Comodo/InstantSSL and Godaddy is that Godaddy do a better job of verification are about 1/5 to 1/20th the price and whilst the process could be improved. They have the best customer support (it exists!) not difficult to beat the others. So got to give them top marks since the are so much better than the rest, but lots they could improve.

I came accross Godaddy a couple of years ago. Their prices are highly competitive, the customer service staff have always been very helpful and quick to resolve any of my issues ( issues i caused!). I was a SSL newbie when i first used them and the instructions they gave were easy to follow and from buying my first ever SSL i had it installed within a couple of hours. These days i can have one bought and installed in less than an hour. Thankyou Godaddy for being great!!

The only thing that held up the ssl cert process was a drivers license that wasn't scanned in properly. Other than that I could have had my Deluxe SSL Certificate probably the same day. I was given a phone number to the SSL Cert department and I called them several times as I've never done this before. Sending documentation to their ra@godaddy.com then reporting the incident number to their Cert team it sped up the process.

The support is terrible! I followed the instructions on the GoDaddy Web site but they were wrong and incomplete for Tomcat. The technical support is staffed with customer service agents. I called several times and got through fairly quickly but they are useless. Don't expect them to help you on anything technical. They put you on hold to research your question then just point you to the web based instructions.

I've used Godaddy before for standard SSL Certificates, and the automated processing works fine. For EV SSL Certificates, go elsewhere. You must deal with them through Email. They will request documentation and then ask for it to be revised. When you submit the revised documents, they will say you did not submit the revised documents. It's absolutely frustrating! Granted, their prices are significantly lower than other certification authorities. But If I were not this close to having the certificate issued, I would just go somewhere else, and I'm still considering it regardless.

After struggling for days, I finally got the certificate to work. It does work but getting there is difficult. I am not an expert on SSL but I have used several self signed certificates before. I followed the instructions on the GoDaddy Web site but they were wrong and incomplete for Tomcat. The technical support is staffed with customer service agents. I called several times and got through fairly quickly but they are useless. Don't expect them to help you on anything technical. They put you on hold to research your question then just point you to the web based instructions. Note, there is a separate SSL technical support number. They are a little better than the main number but still just point you to the Web site. So if you have the time and patience to figure it out on your own, I would recommend them based on the prices.

I have used CACert before so I knew how to create keys, make request files and how to configure apache on linux to use the certificate. So after the ordering process when I went through the web site and submitted my CRT file I got an immediate response, via email, that my certificate was ready. I downloaded it and another file that I didn't recognize (gd_bundle.crt). I ignored the gd_bundle.crt and put my certificate on my webserver. It worked, but safari complained about the CA so I tried with firefox and it worked without complaint. I did some digging and found you have to install the gd_bundle.crt on the server as well; it provides intermediate CA. Once I had done that it worked in Safari as well (without the warning). Overall, once that part was done, everything worked like a breeze. I was up and running in about 20 minutes max.