Recommended SSL Certificate Authorities for Rackspace Cloud Servers

As from the latest news about Google Algorithm, it appears to us that HTTPS urls will be important for SEO. Here is our thought and Insight about choosing SSL Certificate. The question was asked by a person via Twitter (it was a personal question). Our thought will not vary much with Rackspace’s official recommendations. We do not have any affiliation with any of the Recommended SSL Certificate Authorities. Other SSL Certificate Authorities are not really bad, but basically the need and delivery of the things are optimal with these SSL Certificate Authorities for Rackspace. Possibly the fact is the same for other OpenStack IaaS providers. We have considered many points and products including Rackspace Cloud Files, Load Balancers, Deployment etcetera services.

Recommended SSL Certificate Authorities for Rackspace Cloud Servers

For Rackspace Cloud Servers, Deployment and Load Balancers, we recommend to use Verisign, Thawte and RapidSSL as SSL Certificate Authorities. Please follow our previous guide – How To Install SSL Certificate on Rackspace Cloud Server to learn and understand the needed preparation for generating CSR before you actually place order from any of these SSL Certificate Authorities.

If you want to use Comodo, we do have ready guide to Install Comodo SSL Certificate on Rackspace Cloud Server, but basically it will not work out of the box, you actually need to change the format to fill the fields if you are going to use Load Balancer and Deployment. As Load Balancers and Deployment are likely to be used by most of the advanced websites; Verisign, Thawte and RapidSSL are remaining as SSL Certificate Authorities. Rackspace themselves uses Thawte Extended Validation SSL for the login webpages. There are other SSL Certificate Authorities like GeoTrust, Digicert to name a few. RapidSSL is owned by GeoTrust, by the way.

Some Trick for using SSL Certificate at Budget

If your website handles both HTTPS and HTTP urls and you are in a kind of budget, you can select the least costly one and do not use that service. All SSL Certificate Authorities provide at least 30 days free trial, Comodo alone provides 90 days trial. There are at least 10 standard SSL Certificate Authorities. If you work a bit, actually for one year, you can use the trial of these free certificates. Apart from the insurance and managing the Browsers not to throw the scary pop up of un-trust, practically they have nothing to do with server side security. The basic is dependent on Open / Free Softwares. SSL certificate is long term burden as itself they have nothing to do any kind of direct SEO, Conversion etc. If you can’t cary the total cost of ownership later only for SSL, your HTTPS back links will go away. Try to back link towards HTTP URL and 301 redirect to HTTPS. As for Google, bots will catch the HTTPS URL if you set canonical links properly.

Try to use the least costly unless you really need to get a huge amount of insurance. Comodo PositiveSSL is purchased via NameCheap is the least expensive SSL certificate we found yet. Obviously you can use them but you have to convert one type of certificate issued by the others to fill up the fields.