Last Sunday I had my first chance of buying an SSL certificate and setting it up on Nginx. Prior to that I have always just signed with my own CA, and then just import my own CA’s certificate into browser’s root certificate repository.

Anyway. What happened was on a website I am developing, I have provided some API via Javascript, so this guy I am partnering with can just include my dynamically generated Javascript to produce content on his site. However, his site runs entirely on HTTPS but mine is not, so you get that dreadful This Page Contains Both Secure and Non-Secure Items error message in some IE versions.

I guess the easiest way for me to fix it up is actually running the site on HTTPS as well. So I went out and bought a certificate from GoDaddy ($18/year — why so much price difference?), but it wasn’t that trivial as GoDaddy does not have any installation instruction for Nginx, which my site is running under. Why not?! Consider Ngnix already has a sizable market penetration (especially if are a Russian malware distributor). Well, here are the steps.

By this time everyone should have already knew it — ICANN has terminated the accreditation agreement with RegisterFly because of the issues that I will not talk about here, but are thoroughly tracked and documented at RegisterFlies.com. The fiasco has caused 900,000+ domains in limbo over the past few weeks — people cannot log into their account, cannot renew nor transfer the domains to other registrars. To some it might mean $10 registration fee doing down the drain. To others it might mean lost of a few very important domains!

GoDaddy.com, the domain registrar company that brought us cheap domains back in earlier part of this century, has recently doubled the storage space and data transfer of its already insanely oversold shared hosting plans. For example, 100Gb storage and 1,000Gb data transfer just costs you $6.99/month, or cheaper if you sign up longer terms.