I quit using register.com years and years ago because of problems i don't even remember (price probably). I do everything through godaddy now who has been good but their prices for anything other than domains can be a bit expensive. What I've realized though is that there really seems to be no standard at all for SSL certificate prices. Godaddy was offering them for $44, digicert was offering them for $144 (all be it 2048-bit) and register.com was offering them for $12.67. $12.67 for a 256-bit SSL cert was a great price so I decided to buy one for 5 years for my new site (areapilot.com).

So I purchased the cert and went through their setup process which required a CSR. Well I can never seem to remember all the options to create a CSR so I decided to follow their instructions. To summarize their instructions all i had to run was:
openssl req -new -nodes -keyout myserver.key -out server.csr

So I did that and copied the CSR to their form but got the following error:
Activation Error : We couldn't activate your digital certificate at this moment. The CSR uses an unsupported key size. Please try again.

Tried to do it about 5 times varying it up each time but no luck. I remembered in the past that I would usually have to run 2 keys to create a CSR so I decided to google for instructions from someone else.
Luckily both geotrust and rapidssl had the correct instructions to create a CSR for register.com
openssl genrsa -out www.mydomain.com.key 2048
openssl req -new -key www.mydomain.com.key -out www.mydomain.com.csr

My guess is the reason for the more expensive certs from godaddy, digicert and the rest are because they pay to employee competent technical writers.

--Eric Kinolik