Domain name management platform Realtime Register, a domains platform aiming its services at registrars and resellers across the globe, has completely renewed its SSL certificate portfolio. With over 1,000 TLDs from 50 registries in its portfolio, the domain name management platform now also offers its reseller partners over 90 different SSL certificate types from five certificate authorities to sell to their customers.
Realtime Register, a company from the Netherlands, started its operations early 2000 as a platform for domain management – with an ICANN accreditation and contracts with all well-known registries. This has resulted in Realtime Register’s current portfolio with over 1,000 TLDs being offered to end-customers through over 1,100 reselling partners worldwide.
“We now see customer demand is changing and our partners are looking for additional services to bundle with domain names,” said Berend van Dalfzen, CEO of Realtime Register. “Take security and trust for instance. An increasing number of man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks, website hacks and data leaks has created a major opportunity to sell SSL certificates. Website and business owners increasingly need the security provided by an SSL certificate to make sure data transactions are securely encrypted.”
The market for SSL certificates is, according to Realtime Register. Research growing at twice the rate of domain names or web hosting statistics provided by Google and Mozilla show that the number of page loads conducted over SSL has increased from 30% in 2014 to 80% in 2019. Additional statistics provided by Let’s Encrypt show that 95 million websites worldwide were using a free SSL certificate in Q1 2019. This would represent just 0,1% off all websites, while 32% of websites still didn’t have an SSL certificate.
Paid vs. Free SSL Certificates
“The major opportunity we currently see is the increasing adoption of SSL certificates and, paradoxically, the introduction of free Domain Validation (DV) certificates,” said Mr. Van Dalfzen. “We truly believe free SSL certificates aren’t a threat to paid SSL certificates, they are actually helping build demand for paid SSL certificates.”
“While the often-used free certificates and DV certificates deliver secure data transactions, they don’t prove trust,” added Van Dalfzen. “Research shows that almost half of phishing websites now use a free or DV certificate to fake trust. That is why we see an increasing demand for Organizational Validation (OV) and Enterprise Validation (EV) certificates, where website owners are validated by the Certificate Authority. These certificates deliver a level of trust that free and DV certificates can’t deliver which website-owners are increasingly willing to pay for. And with the competitive pricing we are offering our partners, this increased demand is a very interesting opportunity for our partners.”
