Why does HMG charge a setup fee and ongoing monthly fees to host SSL?

We have had several clients ask this question after getting advice from various other companies, or after purchasing a cert from their domain provider, etc. So please allow us to explain what setup and hosting entails to help you understand why we must charge for the additional services you are receiving: 

1. We charge a one-time setup fee and monthly hosting. This covers all of the sites you host with us, which may include your main website, Career Portal, HaleyMail, Talent Showcase, etc. Even though our expense increases with each site, we wanted to make our pricing easy and inexpensive since it is in all of our best interest to host your sites securely.
   
   
2. When you purchase and provide a custom cert, it actually requires a dedicated slot on our load balancer, which has limited slots available. This means we have an added hardware expense to ensure we have space for each cert. We are also charged more to pass SSL traffic over the load balancer than we are HTTP (non-secure) traffic. We do not charge more for this situation to keep the pricing and implementation as simple as possible.
   
   
3. If we provide the cert for your site(s), we have the cost of procuring the cert(s). Again, we do not charge more to provide certs because we are trying really hard to make this a no-brainer decision for you. Hosting under SSL is a best practice that we strongly encourage you to implement.
   
   
4. We have costs to implement the cert which include conversations back and forth to gather the necessary information, physical setup of the cert, configuring the site to use the cert, testing and maintaining, as well as providing ongoing customer service when questions, issues or changes arise, including annual recertification.
   
   
5. There is website work that must be done to ensure all the assets on the site are served securely. This means a site QC (testing your site) and potentially scheduling time for our team to make adjustments on your behalf. We must do this for both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. Additionally, Google Analytics has to be adjusted to see the https traffic, or you risk losing SEO value.
   
   
6. There is time involved in assisting you and your IT team or vendor in changing your DNS so your website is pointed to the new, correct IP.  For some clients, this can be a significant amount of customer support, which we do not charge extra to provide. (Did I mention that our Client Success Team has the patience of saints and works tirelessly to help you through this process?)
   
   
7. After SSL is implemented, we then monitor the site and cert and proactively reach out when the cert needs to be renewed, or if we provided the cert, we renew on your behalf.
   
   
8. The bottom line is that we are providing additional service, and incurring additional expense, so therefore there is additional cost. We have done everything possible to drive down cost to ensure the price is inexpensive and the value is great for you. 

Refer to “Why do you want SSL hosting?” for more information