On Aug 10 2010 I bought a 1-year SSL cert from GoDaddy (I know, I know) for $12.99. I installed it and successfully used it on an ecommerce site.
On June 25th I get an email warning me that my cert "is coming up for renewal in 15 days". June 25 + 15 days == July 10th. Sure enough, this morning GoDaddy auto-renewed my SSL cert. Which I never enabled auto-renew on. And, they raised its price to $49.99.
Pretty impressive, GoDaddy has four levels of scams going on here:
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The expiration date on the cert itself is Aug 12 2011. But they try to renew you about a month ahead of the expiration date, effectively shorting you a months worth of your cert's lifetime.
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GoDaddy enables auto-renewal by default. It's easy enough to opt out of auto-renewal for their domains, but I couldn't find a way to disable it for SSL certs. I foolishly concluded that meant it wouldn't auto-renew.