SSL Certificate Tester – Let us test / check your web site certificate
Posted by John on August 15th, 2009
Techie alert – sometimes it is helpful to see how your web site’s SSL certificate 
looks from other folks / outside. These tools may help.
SSL Checker – SSL Certificate Verify.
SSL Certificate Tester – Check Certificates.
SSL Certificate Checker – CodeFromThe70s.org
I did not include gimped tools from the Thawte / Verisign company, as they only check their own certs.
These tests are done over the ‘net so may not be suitable for internal / LAN type sites. But they also don’t require anyone to have tech knowledge, or make you use an openssl binary to connect manually from the command line. Nor do they require you to bug anyone, asking if they can browse to it successfully, heh. By all means, as always if you have a good link for other resources, just comment and I’ll add it.
J.
P.S. For simple encryption without needing to verify anything but domain ownership, it’s pretty hard to beat Godaddy. If you are interested in cheap, non business class, I’d recommend you scout out any of the $12.99 per year promo discount codes for them; they were already significantly cheaper than most other folks at $30 per year, but $13 is better. Yep. A company I dealt with last month paid on the order of $200 per cert, in bulk prepaid lots no less (!) for effectively the same cert from one of the original vendors. That’s just not necessary in 2009 folks.
Forward looking folks : Check the https website cert that the entire WordPress.Com site is running on. It’s a Standard SSL Wildcard, and it costs them under $200 per year to secure thousands of subdomains such as https://datasecurityclass.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/ihors-ssl-topic/ WordPress corporate (not .org, .com) felt it was fine to go with the Standard, and I agree.
It’s not so much that it costs less per year than the “Deluxe” SSL Wildcard, but if you check, the Deluxe has a max 3 year lifespan; their cert is good for 5 years total. In essence, they got 5 years of SSL capability (trusted by that same 99.3% of browsers as other folks tout) for actually tens of thousands of sites, for $900 or less. I get no commission from GoDaddy, but I think there’s a reason they’re beating the heck out of the rest of the industry in new SSL cert issuance.
In EV land, 2 years is the max, and there is no wildcard option due to tighter security requirements (as well as simple business sense, ahem). EV makes great sense if you’re taking credit card orders on a screen; that should hopefully only be one website.
