Leaving aside the question of whether their response was reasonable (I see the arguments either way), it turned out that using their service to secure your website was not free.
> it turned out that using their service to secure your website was not free
All they claim is to provide free certificates for non-commercial use, and that they do provide. If people read something else into that it isn't because they were deliberately led to.
Though many people picking up a cert without really knowing the infrastructure won't know about revocation infrastructure and such so might have mislead themselves by having not read the Ts&Csm.
Re:HTTPS as a ranking signal
by lazylizard on Thursday August 07, 2014 @09:34AM
(#8147595)
actually, what i think is.. they're as near 'free' as it gets, probably. at least there's no up front cost using them. then its a lottery as to when u need to pay them to revoke... it could still end up cheaper than paying yearly fees for other certs, i imagine.. total cost of ownership or something..
Now if there had been a problem with their signing certificates then I would have expected them to revoke anything affected for free and offer replacements similarly at no cost.
OK, they could have done that anyway (or perhaps offered a discount on the revoke charge) as an good will gesture, but they didn't, so what.