I worked quite a bit with SSL certificates in the 90s. They were expensive back then, there were only a few CAs to choose from. Then Thawte entered the market and was cheaper than the rest. I think they were $200.
Maybe DNS was free and SSL cost something? The $200 figure is ringing bells. All I remember was the faxing and trying to explain to the CEO we need to send copies of incorporation documents to a random company no one had heard of.
+1, never realized Mark S. Was the founder of Thawte! I co-founded one of the first ISPs in Brazil back in 94-95, so we used VeriSign for SSL certificates and had to put up with their high prices ($500 or so), plus the hassle of having company's certification of incorporation officially translated into English (rinse and repeat for every of our corporate hosting customers).
Thawte came soon after, but IIRC their root keys weren't included in the first few Netscape releases (or was it the first IE?), so it generated a warning when accessing the site. We had to keep paying overpriced VeriSign certs for a few more years, until Thawte became widely accepted.
If you go back far enough, domains were an email away or at most a one time fee. I had one back that long ago, and remembered paying something for it, but that was because I didn’t have my own server. This was for a uucp/email gateway, so I needed someone with a server to batch up the email for me to download.
I remember it being $70 per domain for two years (from NetSol), but I don't remember when -- I'll go with "sometime around '95, plus or minus five years or so".
Got my first domain in 1996, and it was indeed $70 from netsol. I had many ideas to pursue and wanted to domain them all, but it was too costly, so I limited to just a couple up back then.
