Point I am making is you now have a viable lower cost alternative that is a REAL certificate. It really irritates me when people add the sort of comments and inferences that you just have when in reality there are thousands of people who navigate startSSL’s site just fine (as you can tell from the comments on this post). I think your inability to do so is related to a skill problem on your side coupled wiht an inability to ask for help. It is really just your loss (the fee you will be paying to the other ones) and your choice to do so to compensate for your inability to work with the startSSL site.

Thanks for sharing tho.

Client certificate authentication is no flaw, StartCom decided that this is the only means for protecting subscriber accounts sufficiently, their information and possible validations. Just imagine somebody would gain access to your account and request a few certificates of the domains you already validated…or even worse impersonate you.

However it is correct that client certificate must be treated with care, it’s a responsibility placed onto our subscribers. It’s your responsibility to create an adequate backup of your certificate – you can take it with your, move it around, import into other browsers and systems, remove them when you are done. Obviously there are smart cards and reader-less USB tokens which are extremely helpful for this task, but a simple disk-on-key will do as well. See this item on how to backup your keys from the browser: https://www.startssl.com/?app=25#4