Cheaper SSL certificates for Rails and Ruby committers

As a huge thank you to all the people who brought us Ruby and Rails I am offering to setup special discounted accounts for buying SSL certificates, hosting and domain names with my WideCert microbusiness.

Basically I am reselling certain GoDaddy services. The actual services are provided and supported by them. On most products there is a commission that I earn.

I am able to specify certain customers as being discounted. This means I don’t make any commission on sales to them. It is probably intended for friends and myself. As a matter of fact these discounted prices are the main reason I became a reseller.

There are varying discounts depending on the product you order. But a SSL certificate will be a discount of more than $4. So if you are an eligible developer, you will get the SSL cert for more or less $15.70. I think this is basically the cheapest you can get them anywhere at the moment.

The savings on wild card certificates are huge. Domain names don’t pay that much commission but I think you will still save a bit over regular prices.

To see the actual price you get yourself I need to set you up as a discounted customer first. You then select the item and go to your shopping cart where your discounted price will show.

Who is eligible?

I may add to this later but to begin with:

• Rails core team including Rick Olson who isn’t listed yet on the official page.
• Matz and other ruby committers (is there a list somewhere?)
• Anyone listed as a developer or admin in any RubyForge project with actual released code.

What do you need to do?

First of all go to WideCert and create an account. Sorry the site design is not the best, but click on “My Account” and there is a link to do so under the login form.

Once you have a customer number send that to me in an email at [email protected] with a url identifying you as eligible (eg a RubyForge project page). I will then set you up. There is no need to buy anything, feel free to do it as a just in case kind of thing.

Support

The real support will be coming from GoDaddy staff, but I have created a handy Guide to creating and installing certificates on lighttpd that you might find useful.

Warning

I don’t think that there are any upper limits to how many people I can add, but GoDaddy might have some internal limit. If I ever hit that then I wont be able add new people. Also if GoDaddy for any reason threaten me I will probably have to stop.

Feeling left out?

Anyone can still buy SSL certificates for $20 which is still a pretty damn good deal in my book.

Also Rails hosting for $8.95

I am also now able to offer Rails hosting for as low as $8.95 . I have just ordered an account to try it out myself. Don’t buy one just yet until I have verified that it actually does the job.