Re:StartCom launches a new service – StartEncrypt
by regecks on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @02:39AM
(#11991898)
Bit late, but an R&D contact from StartCom told me that they will be supporting IETF ACME with StartEncrypt, with the possibility of open source as well.
Firstly, they've completely ignored the existing standards effort of ACME, which Let's Encrypt has cooperated with to develop, and created their own API. This detracts from the effort to standardise this, to no real end. Use Let's Encrypt and you can avail yourself of the entire ecosystem of ACME clients, of which there are many (I develop one). It's likely there will be other CAs supporting ACME in time as well. Whereas this is a CA-specific API with, presently, one implementation.
Secondly, they're still carrying out the dubious practice of charging for revocations.
Thirdly, they claim "Not just for one domain, but up to 120 domains with wildcard support", but this is under their 'Pro' offering, yet Let's Encrypt supports up to 100 SANs per certificate for free. Their free service is limited to 5 SANs.
The only apparent benefit of their free certificates over LE certificates is the one year expiry time. But the whole point of the LE 90 day expiry time is to motivate automation, which is a gain in the long term.
Fourthly, their website is full of broken English, which is impressively amateurish for a CA and the high barriers to entry you generally expect that to imply.