i complain a lot about godaddy’s user interface for buying/managing/renewing SSL certificates. just so you don’t think i’m JUST whining, here’s what it looks like from this user’s perspective:

i get a nice looking email from godaddy. “time to renew one of your SSL certificates! renew early!” ok, that seems like a good idea, so i click the big green “Go To My Renewals” button.

I’m already logged into my godaddy account, and as advertised the button takes me to the My Renewals page. except… it says i don’t have any renewals pending. or any renewable products at all. i hit the refresh button a few times and navigate to the top and back to the My Renewals page, no luck.

ok so, that’s broken. which wouldn’t be too surprising, except it was broken last month too.

whatever. so i go to the SSL Certificates section under My Account, and i see this:

a list of all my certs, with a huge red exclamation point telling me i have products that will expire soon. “Renew now!”. where do you think that link goes? yep, to the My Renewals page that shows i have “no products renewing the next 90 days”. or ever, if i change the search filter to “all renewable products”.

well, that’s OK, cause i’ve got a link to “Manage Certificate”. so surely i can renew from there, right?

don’t be so naive. also, to show how gullible you are, you probably expected that link to take me to some info about that specific cert, right? ha! it really just takes me to different list of ALL my certs, with various options of what i can do to/with them. and renew isn’t one of the options.

well OK, but the cert names are clickable. so i guess i can probably click one of those and… WTF??? i get a read-only view of some cert details like serial number and key length, and the same options (site seal, rekey, revoke, etc.) as the previous screen. no renew.

ugh. i guess i must have missed something earlier. besides the “Manage Certificate” link that turned out to be a dead end, the My Account cert list had links on the cert names also.

you can also use checkboxes to select one or more cert, but your only option from here is “Cancel Account” (which i happen to know from past experience actually means “turn off autorenew”,  by the way)

so… where does that link go? hey check this out!

progress! the renew option appears in the right panel. and for some incomprehensible reason, the Cancel Account checkbox is now selected. ignore that, i guess. let’s select a renewal period.

here are the options.

sweet! i can get as many years as i want for $199.99

except, that turns out to be a lie (not surprisingly). 5 years costs exactly 5x as much as 1 year.

skipping ahead, i order 2 renewals and pay for them. note that at this point i haven’t actually received my renewal certificates, but at least i’ve paid for them.

i get a receipt email that has some more big green buttons:

well, that sounds promising. let’s Activate one of these suckers. i push the button, and it takes me to the same old My Account list of ALL  my certs, with no indication of what to do next.

i click on the cert name on the list (hey, it worked last time!), and now it shows this:

um, ok “renewal pending”. what does that mean? i don’t really believe it’s “pending” because i haven’t even provided the cert renewal technical details and it hasn’t started the verification process yet.

there’s only one clickable link there, so like a sucker i click it. it takes me to the list of all my certs with the rekey/revoke options that we saw before when we clicked the Manage Certificate link. There’s a link labeled “missing products? click here to update your list” but it doesn’t do anything. arrggghhhhhh!!!! at this point i’m swearing out loud at my monitor. i go home for the night with intention of having a drink or 3.

[skip ahead 13 hours and several drinks later]

i come back and click the Activate button again, same result. i click the cert name again and get the same Account details panel. but this time when i click the link on the cert name, something different happens: a list of “credits”, each of which has link labeled “request certificate”.

so at this point, we’ve seen:

1. the link in the 1st email didn’t work
2. the manage certificate link doesn’t help, and goes to a screen that’s not specific to the cert the link was next to.
3. there are 2 different lists of all my certs, with different branding and different options, but neither has a renew option
4. the only link that took me to a renew option was the unlabeled link on the cert name in one of the 2 cert lists (but not the other one)
5. the price list for renewals is misleading (or arguably just wrong)
6. the Activate link in the 2nd email doesn’t work
7. the unlabeled link in the Account detail panel eventual goes to a page with a list of the renewal credits i bought, but only after an unspecified period of time and several drinks have elapsed. in the interim it goes somewhere irrelevant instead.

and now hours, drinks, and about 1000 clicks later i’m at the point where i can “request certificate”, which is what i was trying to do when i started this process.

i manage a web application development shop for a living. this interface wouldn’t be considered acceptable for a pre-production prototype at my place, and we’d be embarrassed to show it to anyone. but somehow godaddy is able to live with it for months and years on end. i don’t get it.

why do i still use them?

• they’re cheap
• their cert approval process is sensible
• i keep thinking maybe they’ll fix their $##%#%# user interface eventually LOL