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StartSSL is a b* to use, the free tier. I can't renew a cert before it expires.

That's not exactly true. You can renew it before it expires. You just can't renew it until it is nearly expired. I think it's like a 2 week window or something like that.

The bigger complaint about StartSSL should be that if you need to revoke the certificate you have to pay for it.

For a free service though I don't think their requirements are too terrible.

That wouldn't be such a problem given that most SSL stacks (correctly, IMO) ignore revocation checking... except that you can't get a new cert without revoking the old one. It would otherwise be reasonable to determine you don't care about getting it revoked (and therefore don't want to fund the revocation infrastructure, like a highly-available OCSP responder) but you just want a new cert.

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