Failure is a great teacher.

I have a client that will need a secure certificate to they can accept credit cards.  (If a client does not already have a merchant’s account, I usually suggest starting with Paypal or Google Checkout.)  So I bought the low-end, one-domain certificate and assigned it to a shared hosting account at Godaddy.

I had no idea that for over 72 hours, I would be locked out of the hosting control panel.  Thankfully I still had FTP access.  But I lost the WordPress schema from one of my databases (good thing I had a backup).  The A records for domains not registered by Godaddy had to be changed.  Most of my file permissions were changed to read-only which is a problem for WordPress sites.

And to top it off, the secure certificate is not going to work the way I wanted it to with the domain for which I bought it.  This part was my fault for failing to do more research before buying.

Still, I would have liked to have some warning first that the server would be upgraded to accommodate the SSL certificate.

Lesson learned: if a client needs an SSL certificate, I will set up a separate web hosting account under Godaddy.