Digital Certificates for Practitioners in Private Practice: What to Avoid

Thanks to a colleague who works in clinical trials for passing on news of a decision at the end of May which led to GoDaddy.com taking over the entire domain portfolio of RegisterFly.com. I posted last year about my atrocious experiences dealing with RegisterFly, and my comments are included in part two of our article on buying a digital certificate for your private practice or other website. (The link goes to part two, which recounts my own purchasing experiences; see part one for an introduction to SSL and digital certificates.)

It turns out that ICANN actually took the highly unusual step of stripping RegisterFly of their accreditation to handle domain registrations, and ultimately GoDaddy wound up taking over their portfolio of 850,000 domains. (See the ICANN announcement and the GoDaddy press release from the decision at the end of May.)

As I’d previously urged in the SSL article, always check around, regardless of what your previous experiences might have been with a given company, and regardless of what you might have heard about a company from other people: in my experience, there are some very shoddy operations out there, and well-meaning webmasters just trying to set up their sites for simple secure transactions can easily find themselves on the wrong end of a customer service battle they’re destined to lose. As of this writing, despite the public dressing down by ICANN over unacceptable domain registration services — and a big front-page notice informing customers of this fact — RegisterFly is still happily in business selling other services — including digital certificates. Caveat emptor.

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