Last year when a bunch of new faces took over running our server farm, they helpfully forgot to renew our SSL and then informed us that we would have to sort it out ourselves in future. So I did a bit of searching and found that one of the companies we have registered domain names with in the past offer secure certificates at a reasonable cost.
Despite my misgivings about using them because I think their website is rubbish and their control panel is badly designed and unintuitive, I nevertheless ordered one from them.
That in itself was easy. The only problem was it didn’t work. I emailed their technical support and they informed me that I had purchased an Auto CSR and should have used manual CSR. They refunded the money and I purchased what I was told was the correct one. This was fine apart from the fact that the manual CSR didn’t work either.
To cut a long story short, a number of emails between me and their “support” team yielded no results so I requested a refund and went and bought one elsewhere. Having heard nothing but silence for over 2 weeks, I eventually got an email back stating that they couldn’t refund our money because the money back guarantee expires after 7 days. They then marked the job as “complete” on the support page.
I could have kicked up a fuss but I have more important things to do than deal with petty thieves so I left it alone. But today I received an email stating that the certificate expires in 14 days. It says we will not need to do anything because it will automatically be renewed 14 days prior to the renewal date.
The funny thing was that the email was sent to us less than 16 days prior. Well, when I say 16 days, it was actually sent on Saturday at nearly midnight so I couldn’t actually read it until the day they threatened to take the money out of our account. Money for something we never had in the first place because they couldn’t be bothered to do their job.
Now, I’m not going to be petty and name and shame this company because that would be unprofessional and might get me into trouble. So I will just advise anyone who is thinking of buying anything from a company with such a hideously grotesque website should think twice before doing so.
