The importance of your Certificate Authority choice

People tend to get so bogged down in choosing what kind of SSL to get for their site that they don’t spare much thought for the issuing Certificate Authority (CA). That’s a big mistake. Choosing a bad CA that’s not trusted by tech companies can mean your SSL certificate won’t work properly, meaning you wasted your time and money. In this article, we’ll discuss why which CA you choose is paramount to your website security and why we think you should get a Comodo certificate from Namecheap.

The SSL ecosystem and trust

So, why is CA trust so vital? For SSL certificates to work as designed, a lot of reliance is placed on trust. When a site’s SSL communicates with a website browser, the browser initiates a secure connection based on trust for the issuing CA that digitally signs the certificate. 

CAs are responsible for creating, issuing, revoking and generally managing SSL certificates across the internet. They also must verify each SSL requestor through a process called validation. This means they investigate the person or business requesting an SSL, ensuring they have access to a website’s admin email or that a company actually exists. So it’s up to them to ensure web encryption keeps going and only verified people or businesses receive them. No pressure! 

Because of that responsibility, they must adhere to certain standards laid out by the Public Key Infrastructure Consortium. If a CA engages in shady behavior, they can lose their trust status. Tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Mozilla may decide to remove the CA from their list of trusted root certificates. If this happens, any SSL signed by that CA’s root certificate will no longer work on those companies’ browsers. 

So, why a Comodo SSL?

The fact of the matter is, if you choose a Comodo SSL, you don’t have to give any second thoughts to trustworthiness. With over two decades of experience in the digital security business, Comodo is one of the world’s leading CAs. If you get an SSL from them, you can be certain your website will be SSL-secured in no time, without any issues from web browsers or otherwise. 

Conclusion

Now that you know the importance of trust in the SSL ecosystem, you should have the tools to check whether a CA is reliable before you buy. It underlines the importance of always conducting your own research before purchasing anything online.