dougandrews.co.uk

I’m really fuming.

Every year or two it comes around that I need to renew the Thawte security certificate on www.selfcateringhols.com. Every time it comes round I have to refresh my mind as to what exactly needs doing. Every time it is the same, the documentation is unclear. There’s no one document that tells you everything you need to know, with the result that if you don’t know what to look for it becomes incomplete.

The thing that really really bugs me is that I thought I’d completed everything and having spoken to the live support on several occasions was under the impression that the certificate had been renewed and was OK. Having checked the site I saw the VALID certificate and moved on.

Today I went to the site and what did I see? INVALID security certificate!

It seems that as part of the whole process I omitted to click on a link, presumably to say that yes please I would like the certificate to show as valid. This was not made clear to me at any point, either in the documentation or with the live help.

I have a confession to make: I did this last time as well – the thing is that I do it so infrequently that I am effectively starting from scratch each time. I knew this time round that there had been ‘something’ that had tripped me up last time but nonetheless was sure I’d done everything right this time.

Thawte: ‘it’s a trust thing’, well as far as our visitors are concerned Thawte are doing exactly the opposite to what we are paying for, instead of giving them confidence to book online they’re actively telling them not to!

Last time this happened I asked them why it had not been incorporated into the ‘main’ process (there really is no added value in the action, there is nothing more to it than going to a page and clicking on a link). They told me that it had been requested and they were looking into it. This time around the response was more or less the same but was that it had ‘been requested but never seemed to happen’.

Overall my impression of Thawte is extremely poor, I’ll be looking at alternatives but suspect there is little option which may be why Thawte continue as they are.