Whilst doing some other work for #dayjob,  I came across this little outfit based out in Israel doing free Class 1 SSL certificates for a year.

Ok I thought what’s the catch (other than it’s about as trustworthy as a man claiming to be secure , but can’t demonstrate it), it seems there isn’t much of a catch :

1. The T’s & C’s state it has to be for “non-commercial” activity.
2. It’s only Class 1, funny enough they do Class 2 and EV certs as well – for a cost naturally.
3. It’s only for a year, but you can just keep renewing it every year.
4. Errr and that’s about it really.

All in all, it’s worth signing up and using it for test certs and things like that, I tend to use it for test certs for Loadbalancers/Offload SSL box’s, saves explaining to people why you need to purchase certs for a development environment, anyway it’s worth a punt — https://www.startssl.com/