I tried to get a certificate for my own domain name, but I was not allowed to create an account "pending verification". So really, maybe this is not as easy as the article suggests.
I ran into the same problem when I first used StartSSL a few months ago. It seemed like there were some cases where automatic verification would work and other cases where verification was deferred to a human. I believe StartSSL is a small, possibly one man, operation, so you might have to wait a few hours for human verification. Once my account was verified, everything after that was pretty easy and quick.